(;'K:K '\ V'{)RT,-D AT ± TIME 



1 - R . SLICER 



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ONE WORLD AT A TIME 



ONE WORLD AT A TIME 



A CONTRIBUTION TO 

THE INCENTIVES OF LIFE 



BY 

THOMAS R. SLICER 



How good is man's life, the mere living ! how fit to employ 
All the heart and the soul and the senses for ever in joy ! 

, , . Browning's Saul 



G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS 
NEW YORK & LONDON 
Gbe Ifcnicfterbocker ipress 
1902 



THE L?B«ARY OF 

CONGRESS, 
Two Copies Receives 

MAR. 13 1902 

OePVRJOHT ENTKV 

cIass XXc N<s. 
l ^- y ! 

COPY 3. 



Copyright, 1902 

BY 

THOMAS R. SLICER 



Ube Iknlcfeerbocfter Jpress, mew HJorft 



A FOREWORD TO THE READER 



THIS book is not written for people who 
are satisfied either with their religious 
opinions or with their doubt of other people's 
religious opinions. It is sent out as a con- 
tribution to the incentives of life for those who 
feel that life is not very much worth while, 
and who, in consequence, are looking forward 
to another life, while missing the joy of this ; or 
else, are dealing in a sluggish way with the or- 
dinary experiences of life, not much caring 
whether it is worth while now or anything is 
to follow. The writer believes that life is very 
much worth while ; that a beautiful life may 
be lived in God's good world on terms con- 
sistent with self-respect, and increasingly satis- 
fying as life unfolds and the beauty of God's 
good world is more and more borne in upon 
the mind and heart. 

Of course, the book is written from the 
standpoint of a believer in the good news of 
God which the Unitarian faith announces ; 
but it is far more interesting to think of the 



vi A Foreword to the Reader 

multitude of those who hold this faith without 
knowing it, than it is to imagine that any addi- 
tions shall be made to Unitarianism by afresh 
accession of disciples because of anything that 
appears here. There are in America about 
five hundred Unitarian churches ; but there 
are so many unconfessed and unconscious 
Unitarians in all the churches and outside of 
all the churches that, if a census should be taken, 
the way of looking at life that is called Uni- 
tarian would probably have a larger constitu- 
ency than any of the so-called evangelical 
faiths. 

It is in this conviction that this appeal is 
made to the reader. It is not an appeal in the 
interest of a body of doctrine, but of a way of 
looking at life. The author has often been 
asked by persons curious as to the working of 
the human mind, why it is that, with a long 
ancestry of the ministry, called evangelical, be- 
hind him, he thought it worth while twenty 
years ago to separate himself from the com- 
munion of the orthodox churches and start 
again in the ministry of a free faith. This 
book is the answer to many such questions. 
These questions are not construed as personal 
to the writer, but as due to a natural curiosity 
and to real interest in the state of mind of one 



A Foreword to the Reader vii 



who, being upon what seemed to be a perfectly 
safe sailing craft, preferred to go overboard 
and swim ashore. It is hoped that proof is 
given here of what was found on landing ; and 
since the world grows increasingly beautiful, 
and life adds evermore to its charm, the author 
is bold to address you directly in the hope 
that if the aspect of life is to you pale and in- 
effectual, it may flush with new feeling ; if the 
uncertainties of the mind are burdensome, they 
may be reassured ; and if in a lonely and un- 
befriended way you have been working out 
for yourself a philosophy of life in terms of a 
freer faith and larger hope, it may be seen 
here that there is a great company who find 
in that freer faith and larger hope an illumina- 
tion and joy. 

The title, " One World at a Time," is not in 
any sense to be construed negatively. It af- 
firms " the life that now is," in the faith that if 
the life that now is can be made strong and 
gracious and full of delight, the suggestion 
that it shall ever end will be the last one the 
mind can be brought to entertain. It is good 
to be alive ; but that it may seem as good as 
it ought, it is important to focus the interest of 
life well in the foreground and near the ex- 
perience of to-day. It is hoped that no one 



viii A Foreword to the Reader 

will be disturbed by these pages to the hurt of 
his peace ; but it is necessary for the truth to 
be told always (the truth as it is understood 
by him who speaks), and it is necessary for one 
to be sufficiently disturbed to be awake, in 
order to hear it. 

Thomas R. Slicer. 



Church of All Souls, 

New York. 



CONTENTS 

CHAPTER PAGE 

I. — The Sceptic . . . . . . i 

II. — The Agnostic 24 

III. — The Believer 47 

IV. — From the Sermon on the Mount to 

the Nicene Creed .... 73 

V. — Why do Christians Differ? . . 119 

VI. — What is it to Believe in Christ ? . 137 

VII. — "A Cold and Intellectual Religion" 164 

VIII. — "A Difficult Religion " . 181 

IX. — Does Unitarianism " Pull Down and 

not Build Up " ? . . . . 200 

X. — What has been Built Up . . .218 

XI. — How Religion may be Taught . . 234 

XII. — The Passage from Traditional to Per- 
sonal Religion 254 



ix 

j 

\ 



ONE WORLD AT A TIME 



CHAPTER I 
THE SCEPTIC 

THE man who never had a doubt never had 
a mind. Given a mind, a doubt must at 
some time or other invade it, for the reason 
that the sceptic is the inquirer. We do not 
inquire as to that we already know — we in- 
quire where we are in doubt. The inquirer's 
business is to find things out ; and for the 
most part, he finds things out for the other 
man who does not care to find them out. The 
result is that two classes have been concerned 
with the bettering of the human mind in its 
attitude toward the greatest realities, — the 
sceptic, who has kept the air clear about the 
fires of devotion, and the mystic, who has fed 
the fires with fresh fuel that they may flame. 
These two, — the one who provides the atmo- 
sphere of crystalline clearness of inquiry ; the 



2 One World at a Time 



other who provides the sacrifices upon the 
altars of devotion, — these two have been most 
concerned with the progress of religious 
thought. 

The sceptic is the inquirer. His inquiry 
addresses itself to three distinct subjects. 
For instance, he is conscious of himself. He 
is a being. Naturally, unless he is content 
simply to accept his animal sensations, he has 
to inquire what that being is. He is placed 
as a being under conditions of life, and unless 
he is content simply to stay where he dropped, 
he has to inquire what those conditions are, 
and whether they can be bettered. He is con- 
scious of himself and his environment. He 
has a third question pressing upon his atten- 
tion. It is the question, What is to become 
of me? He wants to know whether he is to 
be snuffed out like a candle, never to be re- 
lighted ; he wants to know whether there is 
any other world ; he wants to know what the 
conditions are that now guarantee to him a 
hold on life that cannot be killed. He wants 
to know these things. So, the sceptic, if he 
has a mind ; if he is not simply a doubting 
machine. There are intellectual outfits that 
seem not to be minds ; they are mere inter- 
rogation points ; if you were to take a magni- 



The Sceptic 



3 



fying glass of great power and take off the 
skull-cap over the brain of that kind of man, I 
suppose you would find the grey matter of his 
brain covered over with little interrogation 
points ; and they would be so knitted together 
that they would have taken the place of the 
free matter in his brain. Your chronic doubter 
is like the chronic complainer. He asks ques- 
tions for ever as the other man sighs and groans 
for ever. But the real sceptic — the man who 
is a real inquirer, who " wants to know," as 
the Yankees say — is out on a voyage of dis- 
covery ; he perhaps does not know whither his 
ship is going, because we sail the sea of life 
under sealed orders, and get far out into the 
deep before we realise which way we are head- 
ing, and what our destiny is ; presently we 
pass over some degree of latitude or longitude 
that indicates whether we are going north or 
south or east or west and whither our general 
direction is likely to take us ; but if he is a 
real voyager, he is more concerned with the 
ship than he is with the destination. He 
understands, in the first place, that the anchor 
is not the whole equipment of a ship. There 
are people who continually say to you, " Why 
do you go on asking questions, inquiring, rais- 
ing these doubts ? " We do not raise them ; 



4 



One World at a Time 



they are raised in us by the very condition of 
things that confronts us, whether in ourselves, 
our environment, or our destiny. We are told 
if we go on raising these doubts, entering into 
inquiry, we will lose our moorings ! Think 
of that being said of a full-rigged ship ! Lose 
its moorings ! That is the thing it means to 
do. It means to have its anchor up and sails 
spread and helm held with a steady hand, its 
compass true and its bow cutting the sea be- 
fore it as it goes. That is the description of 
a ship that is on the business that belongs to 
the great deep. Lose its moorings ! There 
are ships that never have lost their moorings 
in years, and the scum hangs on their sides 
and barnacles have gathered on their bottoms, 
and their copper is eaten through, and their 
timbers are rotten. They have not a sail that 
is not mildewed. They have not a chart that 
is not a hundred years old. They have not a 
compass that will stand the slightest presence 
of any deflecting agency near it. That is the 
condition of a water-logged human mind. 
Now the sceptic is not always wise — I shall 
not defend him under all conditions ; but I say 
that the sceptic is an essential element in hu- 
man society, and his business is to inquire and 
to have it out with himself, with his environ- 



The Sceptic 



5 



ment, and with the questions of his day. Keep 
those three things in view, if you please, while 
I am trying to outline the condition of the 
mind that I am now describing. 

For instance, the inquirer wants to know, as 
to his being, whether he is a mechanism or 
whether he is a spirit. You have to determine 
whether you are a body carrying around a 
soul, as Emerson says, " like a fire in a pan," 
or whether you are a soul equipped with a 
body for the holiest uses. That is the ques- 
tion that is before you as to your being. You 
have to determine whether man has a body 
and himself is a spirit ; or whether man is a 
body without a spirit. For practical purposes 
you can determine that. " The body without 
a spirit is a corpse. The spirit without a body 
is a ghost." It is the combination that makes 
a man. But when you have said that you have 
only said an epigrammatic thing. The prob- 
lem still arises, What is due to each of these ? 
Shall I put all my forces upon the spiritual life 
and live as a spirit should ; or shall I put all 
my weight upon the bodily life and live as an 
animal must live ? For the fact is, the peace 
of life and the power of life depend upon the 
place we give these two elements of our being. 
Given the body as the sum of our concern, you 



6 One World at a Time 



can grow a brute that will be a splendid model 
for a sculptor, but he would not make a nurse 
for a sick child. Given the whole emphasis 
laid upon the spirit and the body neglected, 
you get what would serve as a significant spe- 
cimen in morbid anatomy. The probability is 
that he will have visions of the right that the 
brutal man never had, but the difficulty with 
him is he will not have locomotive power 
enough to carry his vision around. So you 
see the real business of life for the sceptic is to 
inquire what he owes his body and his spirit ; 
and, since he is made up of these two elements, 
to live his life on terms that will bring the best 
union between the two. 

First, his being. The sceptic has to inquire 
what he shall do with it. Now the problem 
having been set, how much he owes his flesh 
and how much he owes his spirit ; having de- 
termined, perhaps, as Browning said, " that 
flesh helps soul," the sceptic has to inquire 
how he can get the best out of himself. 
For the fact is, the business of life is the 
investing ourselves at the highest rate of 
interest. One man takes it in terms of work, 
another man in terms of joy, another man in 
terms of neither work nor joy, but just plain, 
unadulterated worry. He joins a 44 Don't 



The Sceptic 



7 



Worry " Club, and then has nervous prostra- 
tion. The trouble was not with the club ; it 
was with the applicant who went to join it. 
He had fallen into a chronic condition of 
nerves. Everything hit them on the ends and 
nothing laterally. Now nerves played on lat- 
erally will make music like any other stringed 
instrument. But with the irritated ends ex- 
posed from the finger-tips to the soles of the 
feet, — a man in that condition is only fit to be 
wrapped in cotton and taken care of by some 
good woman. 

I hope to prove to you before I get through, 
at least in a sufficiently conclusive way to make 
a working-theory, that the business of religion 
is to add zest to life. If it does not do that it 
does not do much. If you have only enough 
religion to be thoroughly miserable you had 
better get rid of the little that you have, and 
start in business again with better capital for 
which there is a fairer market. The sceptic's 
inquiry is, How can I make the most out of 
myself ? How put myself to the highest uses ? 
So when we deal with the being of man, we 
deal with it in the attitude of scepticism. If 
we do not do this we shall simply sink into a 
flaccid and pulseless condition which will miss 
the very joy of life. 



8 



One World at a Time 



But the sceptic also has to do, as I have 
said, with his place in life. He has to inquire 
whether it is a fit place ; whether the environ- 
ment is right. Let me quote to you a saying 
of Herbert Spencer, which is for its purpose 
as good scripture as that which was written 
eighteen hundred or two thousand years ago. 
Herbert Spencer says, " If there were no 
changes in the environment except such as 
there were adapted changes to meet in the 
thing environed, that would be eternal peace 
and eternal life." That is true. That is, if 
you could build up tissue as fast as it broke 
down, you would have constant being ; if you 
could feed in fuel as fast as you exhausted it, 
in running a machine, you would have per- 
petual motion. For instance, mechanics know 
that on every machine sit two little sprites, 
one Rust and the other Friction. Rust says 
to the machine, " If you stop I will eat you 
up." Friction says, " If you keep going I will 
wear you out." That is exactly what happens 
in the human creature. His study is to get 
himself into such relation to his environment 
that he can run at the greatest speed without 
loss of structure, without a breaking down 
of the mechanism ; or rest in most complete 
quietude without danger of rusting out. 



The Sceptic 



9 



That is what we mean by adjustment to 
environment. 

What happens in the Church as the result of 
this? In the Church men grow restless under 
conditions of their birth and training, and 
they begin to move uneasily, just as birds do in 
the nest when they feel their wing-feathers com- 
ing. The bird knows perfectly well that he 
does not belong in the nest for ever. He sees 
the flitting of other birds full-fledged upon the 
wing. The little thing that was hatched in 
the nest chipped its shell and was a most out- 
rageous looking thing when it came into the 
world. It had no feathers ; it was just a little 
blob of meat ; it never suspected it would ever 
sing. There it is in the nest ; but there comes 
a time when the pin-feathers begin to grow. 
The longer feathers follow. Then the wings 
begin to get a little plumage upon them, and 
finally are covered. Then there comes a day 
when it sits on the edge of the nest and falls 
out, but it does not do that many times. The 
mother finds it on the ground — this little 
helpless thing, scared because it has fallen 
out of the nest. She encourages it to hop a 
little, to flutter its wings a little, until pre- 
sently it gets upon the wing and goes from 
twig to twig~to go back into the nest ? 



io One World at a Time 



Never. Not until next year when it has a 
brood of its own and eggs to sit upon and 
song-birds to hatch out. Next year it will go 
into some other nest that it has made ; but for 
this year it is on the wing. That is the con- 
dition of the sceptic who finds himself born 
into a set of beliefs that he cannot possibly 
hold, if he would fly. Now he simply tumbles 
out of the nest and wallows around in the dust 
at the foot of the tree. The fall from the nest 
was because he did not understand flight ; 
and you and I in shifting our relations to the 
things we have been taught get many a fall 
and bruise by it. God knows how sore we 
are some days when we have been beaten 
down below the point of faith and hope, and 
feel as if " the heavens were rolled together 
like a scroll to be unread for ever." Let him 
not disturb himself, this fledgling of the nest 
of inherited belief. There shall come a day 
when, by the example of those that have 
learned flight before him, and encouraged by 
those that have learned to sing that were in 
their nests before him, he shall flutter his 
wings and lift himself, and know the beautiful 
and splendid experience of being, not a bird 
on the ground, but a bird in the air. You 
remember those lines of Victor Hugo : 



The Sceptic 



1 1 



" Let us be like a bird, a moment lighted 
Upon a twig that swings ; 
He feels it sway ; but sings on unaffrighted, 
Knowing he has his wings ! " 

That is the whole story. The sceptic that 
only knows how to fall out of the nest has not 
learned much. He must learn how to fly in 
his native element. 

So with society. People who are busy with 
the work of life complain that they are not 
satisfied with their surroundings. They are 
sceptical as to their environment. You say 
you think Lessing was wrong when he in- 
sisted that this was the best possible world. 
Being a true sceptic, you say instead, This is 
the best possible world up to date, but " to- 
morrow is another day." It is another day, 
and if the world does not rise to meet it, then 
it is not the best possible world ; for every day 
must bring not only its discontent, but its 
betterment. It is the business of the inquirer 
to see to it that he fits the environment of the 
day so well that, like the beetle whose shell 
you find upon the trunk of the tree, he shall 
burst it and find wings. That is the business 
of life — growing to your environment, and 
then changing it by the expansion of the 
human mind. I have very little concern with 



i2 One World at a Time 



discontent upon the part of those who are dis- 
contented with other men's discontent. I say 
that the struggle of soul that comes to the 
social state is the salvation of that social 
state — that there is nothing so bad for the 
great mass of men and women as to be pulse- 
less, content, sordid, mere lumps of humanity, 
dropped where they fall, and content to stay 
where they drop. There is a divine discon- 
tent moving in every great nation's heart, by 
virtue of which it becomes a greater nation ; 
in the heart of every social state, by which the 
social state is bettered ; and the business of 
the sceptic is to find the conditions under 
which he lives, and to make them better. For 
instance : The Tenement-House Commission, 
studying conditions of city life among the poor, 
convicts the Building Department of the city 
of neglect and violation of law. Do you 
suppose it was the business of the Tenement- 
House Commission to do that ? It was their 
opportunity. It was their duty. But the busi- 
ness lay with the tenant. He should have 
been discontented to have an air-shaft that 
substituted inches for feet. He should have 
been discontented to have cubic feet of space 
insufficient for the breathing of God's good 
air. He should have been discontented to live 



The Sceptic 



13 



in rooms that had no approach to the external 
air. Why, if you were not restless enough to 
change your place, your mind would fall sick 
and feeble, as a body gets bed-sores lying 
supine wherever it may be placed ! Salvation 
of society lies in the struggle of society for 
the social betterment. 

I will not touch the question of destiny now. 
That belongs in the discussion of the next 
chapter, which deals with the agnostic. He 
knows all about it— or does not know all about 
it. I am going to deal with him as Izaak 
Walton says about the minnow, " Put him 
upon the hook as though you loved him." I 
think I can show that he has, as the sceptic 
has, his place in the sum of things, and has 
done vastly better than he is commonly cred- 
ited with doing. 

Now, what are the conditions under which 
scepticism appears ? 

All progress in science is made by discrim- 
ination. What would be the use of the science 
of microscopy unless you could distinguish 
between the white and red corpuscles of the 
blood ; between those things that in a general 
way we sum up as microbes, which we fear 
and call by bad names ? Scientific advance is 
made, as John Fiske says, when men come 



One World at a Time 



to see dissimilarity against a background of 
uniformity. We know the stars in the sky 
because they hang out dissimilar against a 
background of black in the night. The uni- 
form background throws their brilliancy for- 
ward in differing radiance to the eye of the 
observer. All progress is made by discrimina- 
tion ; and discrimination is the business of the 
sceptic. For instance, the sceptic is usually 
the man who, in advance of his time, if he be 
serious, finds himself holding a losing cause. 
Socrates was the most believing man in the 
Greek lands, and they called him an atheist. 
That is, he was so much an inquirer that he 
was discontent with little gods, and wanted a 
god great enough for the soul that entertained 
him. And if you will read the Dialogues of 
Plato where Socrates is represented as speak- 
ing, you will be struck with the fact that the 
questioner is really the man of faith. It is 
the friends who are about him who are nerv- 
ous about his condition. Take that splendid 
passage in the Dialogue where Socrates dis- 
courses upon his death. He is about to drink 
the hemlock. He who believed in God ; has 
been condemned to death as an atheist, as 
a corrupter of youth, who simply taught them 
to know themselves at their best. We see 



The Sceptic 



15 



him sitting there — a quaint, squat figure, with 
curious physiognomy, the very face seeming 
to be one great interrogation — and someone 
says to him during a pause in the conversa- 
tion, " Socrates, where shall we bury thee?" 
He looks about upon them, and finding the 
questioner, Crito, says : " Crito, have I been 
so long with you, yet do you speak of burying 
Socrates ? You shall bury me if you can 
catch me. But when you have buried my 
body, do not say that you have buried Soc- 
rates." This is the man who was condemned 
to death because he did not believe ; yet that 
inquiring spirit was really the only profound 
believer in the group. For inquiry is essential 
to real faith. Luther was inquiring, labouring 
up the great stair at Rome upon his knees, 
when there sounded a voice to him saying, 
"The just shall live by faith." Read your 
New Testament, and see if in all the pages of 
history there be so radical an inquirer as Jesus 
of Nazareth. We speak of him in the terms 
the theologians teach us. We speak of him 
in terms the doctrinal teachings have inspired. 
But when we begin to read the book for our- 
selves, what do we find ? We find exactly the 
same spirit that was common in the prophets 
of his own race, — Amos, Nahum, Hosea, and 



16 One World at a Time 



Joel. We call them the minor prophets ; they 
were really the great statesmen of Israel. We 
find in Jesus the same spirit. He confronts 
those about him with such a statement as this : 
" Ye have heard it said, ' An eye for an eye, a 
tooth for a tooth.' I say unto you, Resist not 
evil." That was his practical challenge to the 
ancient past. Mark those two sceptics as they 
face each other, — Pilate, the bullet-headed 
Roman, heavy in the jowl and thick in the 
neck, set upon the precarious throne in Jerusa- 
lem, and standing before him this simple 
working-man, Jesus of Nazareth, charged with 
sedition. Pilate asks, " Art thou a king ? " 
They had been saying, " We have brought to 
you a king ; so he calls himself." I can see in 
my mind that figure hardened by work, a 
young man, a little over thirty years of age, 
a Galilean carpenter, straightening himself be- 
fore the throne that represented the power of 
the Roman world, his hands bound together 
and the rude sceptre between them in mock 
sovereignty, and upon his shoulders the cloak 
of some Roman soldier, cast there in derision, 
— I can see him straighten himself before the 
Roman procurator and say, when asked, " Art 
thou a king?" " For this end was I born, for 
this cause came I into the world, that I should 



The Sceptic 



17 



bear witness to the truth. Thou sayest it. I 
am a king." Pilate, the sceptic of the other 
type, says, "What is truth ?" He turns away 
without an answer, expecting none, and goes 
to give judgment against his prisoner. That 
is the sceptic for whom the world has no use, 
and who is only remembered, or largely re- 
membered, by virtue of the man whom he 
condemned. The real inquirer into the truth 
of things and the secret of Being is a sceptic 
of quite another kind. 

Let me name two or three conditions which 
the sceptic who is the true inquirer — the man 
who asks questions and wants them answered 
— is to observe, if his scepticism would lead to 
life. 

The first is, that he shall never shirk the re- 
sponsibility of the answer. Now, a man who is 
simply flipping questions as to his being, his 
environment, and his destiny, without expect- 
ing any answer, who likes the mental agitation, 
does not care for the responsibility that his 
question raises. The true inquirer never asks 
a question the answer to which he is not will- 
ing to hear. It is the very essence of his 
courage. I remember a splendid man, self- 
educated, who came to be the President of the 
Board of Trustees of a great university, a man 



1 8 One World at a Time 



of business and great affairs, who said to me, 
" I was taught that God was a God of wrath. 
1 was taught that there was such a place as a 
cureless hell. I was taught this and this and 
this," reciting the horrible details of instruc- 
tion in his youth, " and I worried myself with 
inquiries as to how this could be ; how I could 
love a God who was not lovable ; how I 
could care for a God who could consign those 
I loved to endless ruin. And one night, tort- 
ured until early morning by these inquiries of 
my doubting spirit, I made up my mind that if 
God was a Being of that sort, He might do 
just what He pleased with me, but I would 
never love Him; and I turned over and went 
to sleep." He took the responsibility of his 
inquiry, and satisfied himself, not with the an- 
swer, but that the answer could not be incon- 
sistent with the sanity and sanctity of human 
nature. So the responsibility that comes with 
the inquiry must never be shirked. Other- 
wise you had much better not ask the ques- 
tion. You had much better be satisfied where 
you are. Inquiring what you are, be satis- 
fied just to know you are alive and no more. 
Inquiring where you belong, that you are just 
where you are put, and no other where. In- 
quiring what is to become of you, put your 



The Sceptic 



19 



hand in somebody's hand, and ask him to look 
out for you as you go through the deep waters. 
There is no other way unless you are will- 
ing to take the responsibility of the inquiry. 
It is a serious matter to raise a doubt in your 
own mind, unless you are going to follow 
it to the end. The other sort of man is 
what we mean by the " doctrinaire." He ap- 
pears in all fields of inquiry in the scientific 
and the practical world as the theorist. I was 
once with a number of people who were all 
going down to the shore together, and some- 
body remembered that one of the young men 
in the party probably was not safe in the 
water. He said to him, " Can you swim ? " 
The young man answered with perfect calm- 
ness, " I understand the theory of swimming." 
We did not let him take to the water. We 
kept him on shore, because the man who 
" knows the theory of swimming " belongs on 
land. It is the condition of inquiry that you 
shall follow it clear through, not in the doc- 
trinaire spirit, the spirit of the theorist, but in 
the spirit of the practical, hard-headed inquirer, 
dealing with life as the most serious thing we 
have to deal with. Why, what is your busi- 
ness compared with your being? What is 
your daily occupation compared with the 



2o One World at a Time 



betterment of your environment ? Is there any 
question so serious as the question of the de- 
stiny that awaits you ? What are you fit for ? 
I say to you in absolute confidence, The thing 
you are fit for, you will get. You do not 
believe that you will get it here ? No, not al- 
ways. Daily destiny does not apparently take 
the lines of fitness. But I have known thou- 
sands of people, and most of those that did not 
get placed in life had not prepared themselves 
for any place. I admit the artificiality of 
society. I admit the unnaturalness of some of 
the conditions. I admit the fact that some- 
times men have not the opportunity that other 
men have, and men are not equal in oppor- 
tunity or power. But, I believe, given a good 
body and a good brain, the whole business of 
life is making one's self fit. Destiny takes 
care of itself. 

The second condition is, not only that he 
shall not avoid the responsibility of the an- 
swer, but that he shall not shun the struggle 
of soul. If the sceptic is a serious inquirer, 
if he is an inquirer intent upon the answer, not 
afraid what the answer shall be, prepared to 
take his share of the risk of having raised the 
question, then he must not shun the struggle 
of soul. It is struggle of body that brings 



The Sceptic 



2 



health. It is struggle of mind that brings 
intelligence. It is the faculty of thought ex- 
ercised that makes it easy to think and a de- 
light to think. It is struggle of soul that 
saves. " We must so trust the order of Nature 
as to believe that whatever questions the 
universe inspires us to ask, the universe can 
answer." So said Ralph Waldo Emerson. 
Someone said to Father Taylor, the Methodist 
chaplain of seamen in Boston, when Emerson 
had uttered such a sentiment, " He is a 
wonderful man, but he will surely go to hell." 
Father Taylor had a kind of mild belief in 
the pit, I suppose, but he turned to the man 
who said Emerson would go to that place 
and answered, " If Emerson should go to 
hell, he would make a change in the climate, 
and migration would set that way." As to this 
view of destiny what has happened ? The 
people who have been consigned to cureless 
ruin have somehow banked the fires and 
slowed down the motion of the world's hate. 

If the sceptic be serious, not a mere 
trifler, the final condition he must fulfil is 
that he shall not shirk the discipline of life. 
It is of no use for you to go out with a ques- 
tion on your lips unless you will take the re- 
sponsibility of the answer and be prepared for 



22 One World at a Time 



struggle of soul — unless, above all things else, 
you are willing to stand up to the discipline of 
life. Suppose a conviction seizes upon a man's 
mind that a certain course of life is the only 
one for him to follow ; he may be a doubter as 
to the social standard ; perhaps all society is 
running the other way ; perhaps the whole 
trend of mind about him is taking another 
course. He may be utterly wrong, mistaken, 
but his mind is dealing with things at first 
hand. To him that course seems to be the 
only course to take. Let him hold that course 
to the end. It may be that he shall find, as 
we do in the Adirondack and Maine waters, 
that he has only taken a short cut across the 
bend, and comes out with his companions 
who have gone a more circuitous way around. 
He has found the short cut to the end ; and 
conviction, and resolution, and struggle of soul, 
and sense of responsibility, and verve and 
power and energy of the individual mind have 
driven him through obstacles that would have 
impeded men of more timid soul. 

We must take the discipline of life. It is a 
splendid thing to stand up and take your pun- 
ishment if you have invited it. I know a man 
whom I greatly revere, who is distinguished in 
his profession, a man of great capability in the 



The Sceptic 



23 



work in which he is engaged, who in his early 
life, from this very curiosity and inquiry, made 
a radical mistake, which he never could cor- 
rect. He has gained all that he has gained of 
power and purpose by taking his punishment 
without whining. There is no place in the 
world for a whimpering man. We were set 
squarely on our feet. We were given power 
and force, clearness of thought, right feeling, 
and we were given these things that we as 
part of its creative power might mould the 
world or fashion it according to the fashion 
that in our moments of inquiry we have seen, 
fashioning ourselves together with it by force 
of our splendid inquiry and conviction. 



CHAPTER II 



THE AGNOSTIC 



HE term " agnostic " has a singular fascina- 



* tion for many minds. It would seem that 
a term which means " not knowing " would 
hardly have fascination for a mind the busi- 
ness of which is to know. I suppose that 
fascination which is exerted by the term arises 
in part from the association with the distin- 
guished name of Professor Huxley, for it was 
Professor Huxley who made agnosticism popu- 
lar and respectable. In the last night of 1856, 
Professor Huxley, at the very beginning of his 
fame, sat alone in his study waiting for the 
birth of his first child. The tension of his 
mind was stretched over the pains of advent 
into this life, and he set himself to say to 
his journal what his ambitions in life should 
be for the three or four years stretching ahead 
of that hour. All that was best in him was 
involved in the holy sacrament of his child's 
birth, and he wrote in his journal : 




24 



The Agnostic 



25 



" I am resolved to smite all humbugs, however big, 
to give a nobler tone to science, to set an example of 
abstinence from petty personal controversies, and of 
toleration for everything but lying ; to be indifferent 
as to whether the work is recognised as mine or not, so 
long as it is done." 

He had started upon his course, which he went 
on in the pages of his journal to describe in a 
German verse of which the translation is in 
part this : 

" Wilt shape a noble life ? Then cast 
No backward glances to the past. 
And what if something shall be lost, 
Act as new-born in all thou dost." 

And so on through a verse of noble purpose. 
Just below this he writes : " Half-past ten at 
night. I am waiting for the birth of my child. 
I seem to fancy that it shall be the pledge that 
all these things shall be." A little farther 
down he writes : " Born five minutes before 
twelve. Thank God ! New Year's Day, 1857." 
That is a painful page, as we continue our 
reading, where, just below, he records in Sep- 
tember, i860, that this same child, " Our 
Noel " (he was born so near Christmas they 
gave him the name), 

" Our first-born, after being for four years our delight 
and joy, was carried off with scarlet fever. This day 



26 One World at a Time 



week he and I had a great romp together. On Friday 
his restless head with its bright blue eyes and tangle of 
golden hair, tossed all day upon his pillow. On Satur- 
day night I carried him here into my study and laid his 
cold, still body here where I write. Here, too, on Sunday 
night came his mother and I to have the holy leave-taking. 
My boy is gone ; but in a higher and a better sense than 
was in my mind when I wrote four years ago what stands 
above, I feel that my fancy has been fulfilled. I say 
heartily and without bitterness, ' Amen ; so let it be.' " 

I have quoted these extracts from the journal 
of a great scientific man, that you may know- 
two or three things about the man with whose 
history the term " agnostic " is most associated 
in the popular mind, and those two or three 
things are : First, that the cause which led him 
first to declare his agnosticism concerning im- 
mortality was a letter of Charles Kingsley, 
perhaps the noblest man in the English pulpit 
of that day, who wrote to Huxley trying to 
comfort him and give him grounds of belief in 
immortality. Huxley, in the tenderest and 
kindest way, challenges Charles Kingsley for 
his proofs, and declares that until some fact 
like the facts of Nature is presented to him, he 
must simply say he does not know. The let- 
ter is a model at once of manly courage and 
paternal tenderness, and I could almost wish 
that the people who claim they know so much 



The Agnostic 



27 



would know as little as Huxley did in that 
hour of what nobody can know. In saying 
this, however, I must call your attention to 
certain limitations upon his statement that ap- 
pear also in this journal and in the letters. 
Huxley was not an atheist. He was so much 
of a scientist that he knew perfectly well that 
philosophic atheism is impossible. Practical 
atheism is possible. That is, a man can live 
as though there were no God, but he cannot 
give a reason for it based on the fact that there 
is no God. In other words, philosophic athe- 
ism has gone out of fashion with the common 
mind, because the scientific mind, led by men 
like Huxley, and Spencer, and Darwin, and 
Wallace, and their co-workers, has given it 
such proofs of the ordered world as to leave 
the being of God the most rational solution of 
that order. So that when Mr. Huxley says 
of the birth of his child, " Thank God ! " he is 
not in the attitude of the French atheist who 
said, " I thank God that I am an atheist!''' 
Mr. Huxley says in another place : " Our true 
attitude is to sit down like a little child before 
the facts of Nature and apprehend them on 
their own ground." And that is the teachable 
attitude. 

I will not trouble you with further extracts 



28 One World at a Time 



from that wonderful life now just published, 
but will proceed at once to the discussion of 
what agnosticism really means, and to the 
discussion of whether it is a rational state of 
mind. 

I hold, as I said of the sceptic, a brief for 
the agnostic on certain lines, because the busi- 
ness of every man who professes to be a 
teacher of the religious life, or a teacher of 
ethics, or an intelligent man busy with his 
kind is to try to get the other man's point of 
view. It is a narrow ledge that has not room 
for two people to stand on it and see the view 
together ; it must be hard climbing and a 
perilous poise if there is only room for one. 
So that the business of life is really to try to 
get the other man's point of view, to see what 
he sees. He may see the rush of the stream 
and say it is a first-class place for the estab- 
lishment of a mill. I may see it and think 
that with its rushing stream it is the most 
beautiful landscape I have ever seen. An- 
other man may see it and say that the water- 
course argues rich pasture land in the meadows 
through which it flows. Each will see it from 
the standpoint of his attitude ; but I am 
bound to try to understand why one man 
wants to build a mill, and why the other man 



The Agnostic 



29 



wants to cultivate a farm, when I only want a 
picture ; the difference is between the practical 
man of affairs and the more practical man, the 
poet, as I hold. I hope to prove to you that 
the man who simply insists upon the things 
that he knows, and declares that he knows he 
cannot know any more, is not the most prac- 
tical of men. 

The term " agnostic " did not originate with 
Mr. Huxley. He adopted it, not knowing, 
I think, that he adopted it from the early 
Christian Church. Mr. Huxley was not a great 
theologian. He was not a great student of 
the early church. If he had been, he would 
not have given so much attention to the story 
in the New Testament of the devils which went 
out of the man and entered into the pigs. 
The real difficulty in that story is, Who paid 
for the hogs ? I never could believe in the 
morality of that story because the swine were 
a dead loss to the owner ; and if there are 
any devils they probably were not drowned ; 
so the whole thing was a loss on all sides. 
Mr. Huxley was continually quoting this in 
his Essays, as though it were a sample mira- 
cle. I refer to this to show that he was not 
a great theologian nor a great biblical critic. 
But the fact is, in the early church, the term 



3o 



One World at a Time 



" agnostic " was assumed by a sect in op- 
position to the " Gnostics," a group of people 
who appeared in the Eastern Church here 
and there, of whom not so much is known 
as one could wish, but who were the "know- 
ing" people, the mystics of their day. The 
" Agnostics" were the men who claimed that 
God did not know everything, that He was not 
omnipresent. So, gradually, the term came 
to be applied to men as not knowing. Grad- 
ually Herbert Spencer took it up and devised 
out of it the term, " Unknowable," as applied 
to God. So we get it in all variations. It is 
a kaleidoscopic term, and yet most men who 
use it and say, " I am an agnostic," simply 
mean, " There are some things I do not know, 
and therefore I will not debate about them." 
Too often they mean, " There are some 
things I do not know because they cannot be 
known." And it behooves them to inquire 
whether that definition is correct or not ; and 
that is the purpose of this chapter. 

Now the position of the scientific mind on 
the subject is this : nothing can be known ex- 
cept from experience. The idealist and the 
experientialist, to use the philosophic terms, 
are opposed the one to the other. The ideal- 
ist lives in a world of visions. The experien- 



The Agnostic 



3i 



tialist lives in a world of experiment. And 
yet, when you come to analyse the term 11 ex- 
perience," it marries itself to a very beautiful 
poetic idealism. Let me tell you how the 
term was first used in a way that included both 
meanings. In the French guilds of artisans, 
the skilled silver workers and gold workers of 
the Middle Age, the apprentice worked seven 
years upon his tasks. When he had wrought 
out some beautiful thing, perhaps in beaten 
silver, he brought it to the master of the 
guild and said, " Behold my experience ! " We 
take over into our English tongue that word 
" experience." He meant by it the sum of all 
his experiments. He had been an apprentice 
these seven years. He had spoiled many a 
good bit of metal. He had dulled the edge 
of many a good tool. He had spent painful 
days and nights of labour. He had given him- 
self to the work with enthusiasm, but the whole 
of it was in this little bit of work here — his 
experience, the sum of his experiments, was 
there, and upon the acceptance of it by the 
Master of his Guild, he might take his kit of 
tools and go out as a journey workman, mas- 
ter of his craft. In other words, the practical 
workman was proved by the beautiful thing he 
had done, and the ideal there embodied was 



32 One World at a Time 



the ideal of his experience there wrought out. 
The scientific man says, " I can only know by 
experience." Now I would say, in general 
terms, that that is true. I have no quarrel 
with that proposition. I am an idealist and I 
am an experientialist in the same sense in 
which I am an individualist and a socialist to- 
gether. Let me say to my socialistic friends 
that the solution of their difficulties lies along 
the line of individualism, as the difficulties of 
the experientialist may be solved along the 
line of intelligent idealism. The socialist, 
when he comes to understand, as I think more 
and more he is coming to understand, that 
" society is an organism in which every cell has 
consciousness," will discover that the health of 
the tissue depends on the health of the indi- 
vidual cell ; so that if he is to have an organic 
whole that is absolutely in health, he must 
start with the health of the cell and see to it 
that no part aches through disease or is lost by 
dismemberment. So in the other field, the 
field of experience, the result depends not sim- 
ply upon the sum of experiences, but on the 
elements that go to make it up. Have I no 
experiences but such as come through the 
senses, or does the union of them in contact 
with their environment constitute another ex- 



The Agnostic 33 



perience ? I incline to feel that the touch, 
smell, taste, sight, and hearing senses do not 
sum up the whole experience of life. I know 
that there is a narrow school of experience to 
which the most radical agnosticism turns, that 
says, " You cannot know anything except what 
you can see, hear, feel, taste, or smell." Well, 
then, you do not know more than a dog, be- 
cause he has all those senses. His scent is 
keener than yours ; his hearing is keener than 
yours ; his sight is as good as yours ; he is so 
swift of foot that he can tell the contact of his 
touch sense with the ground quickly enough to 
lift his foot and go on, while you have to pain- 
fully learn to walk after months of trying. All 
his senses are more alert than yours. But this 
man, who claims to belong to the most radical 
school of agnosticism, and says that he knows 
nothing that he cannot see, hear, feel, smell, or 
taste, I think would hardly agree that the sum 
of life is in the sensations of life ; for the rea- 
son that, if that were so, one artist would be 
as good as another. They use the same col- 
ours, they handle the same pigments and the 
same utensils of their art, the same tools of 
their craft. They see the same view, and they 
have an equal desire to sell their pictures. 
Still, it is not true that artists are all alike. 

3 



34 One World at a Time 



Some artists see Apocalyptic visions such as 
visited John on Patmos, and others will paint 
you a portrait of an onion, and think that is a 
picture. Artists are not alike. Pictures are 
not alike. I heard of a man the other day who 
made up his mind that the reason he could not 
write good poetry was that he did not drink. 
He said, in general terms, " Now I am a moral 
man and an abstainer ; but, as I read, the 
great poets — most of them — indulged in liquor, 
and their best poems were written under the 
influence of drink." I suppose he had heard 
about Poe and a few more who were weak in 
this direction. He told a friend of mine that 
he determined to write a great poem, so he 
bought half a pint of whiskey and drank it all. 
What happened? He went to sleep and did 
not have a single idea. Poets are not all alike, 
but they all have the same senses, if not all 
the same sense. I think we shall have to en- 
large the boundaries of what constitutes ex- 
perience of life, and say that it is not summed 
up in the five senses. The soul sits central, 
and caravans come in through the senses, bring- 
ing traffic from the outside world. The touch 
sense drags its caravans forward, the eye sense 
beckons them near, the ear sense hears their 
footfall from afar. So through these gateways 



The Agnostic 



35 



the central soul receives the tribute of the 
world. What does the soul do with it ? That 
is the problem. This is exactly what Brown- 
ing means when he says that when you strike 
a chord upon an instrument you do not get an- 
other note ; you get "a star" — you get some- 
thing that all the notes have contributed, which 
the aesthetic sense in the musician recognises 
as a new thing, and calls it a chord. That is 
what Emerson meant when he said, " If two 
and two did not sometimes make five, we 
never would get on." That is perfectly true. 
It is the " unearned increment " of the two and 
two that makes the additional one that makes 
five. Two and two have gone out at interest 
and have received their interest in a new convic- 
tion, in a new emotion, in a new ideal, in a new 
sensation, which is a new experience in the 
mind. This narrowing of experience by the 
agnostic to the senses, who says that he does not 
know anything that they do not register, has its 
parallel in the working-man who comes to you 
and says with perfect candour and frankness 
that there is " nothing that makes wealth 
but labour." He means that ; and by labour he 
means that which takes the strength, that ex- 
hausts muscular effort, that wears upon the 
nerve, that breaks down tissue. He means 



36 One World at a Time 



work, labour, — " nothing makes wealth but 
labour." Now, he really believes that. So I 
turn to him and I say to him, " My dear friend, 
I sympathise with your wish to exalt labour, 
but I will take you down here to the East 
River and show you, what has ceased to be a 
wonder, the Brooklyn Bridge. The Brooklyn 
Bridge was a mathematical problem before it 
ever was a bridge. Every worker in metals 
knows that a given grade of steel can be estim- 
ated to the fraction — the smallest fraction — 
of weight as to the strain that it will bear for 
every cubic inch of its length. Every yacht 
— even the keenest racing-machine — is not on 
paper first as a diagram and model ; it is on 
paper as a mathematical problem calculated 
in terms of figures, signs, and mathematical 
nomenclature ; it is a study in mathematics, 
not a study in labour, before ever a keel is laid, 
before ever a sheet of iron or steel is forged. 
The whole thing has sailed the seas of some- 
body's mind before it sailed the Atlantic. The 
Brooklyn Bridge hung up complete in the 
head of the engineer before it ever spanned 
the East River." You are compelled to enlarge 
your meaning of labour, just as the agnostic has 
to enlarge his meaning of experience. Now, 
if by experience I mean a larger thing than the 



The Agnostic 



37 



senses can reveal, how far shall I carry the 
meaning of that word before I reach the limit ? 
Well, I am going to carry it into the mind 
first. I insist that I can grasp a thought, but 
not with my hand. I insist that I can see a 
proposition that is not discernible to the eye. 
I insist that I can hear music that never was 
on sea or land, and that haunts the chambers 
of the mind, and is the cause, in those who are 
competent, of the great oratorios and operas 
that have been given to the musical world. No 
eye saw them ; no ear heard them ; no hand 
touched them. They were regnant in the soul 
of the composer. A competent musician will 
take the score, the orchestration of such an 
opera, and, with the mere score in his hand, 
sit and hear the whole orchestration without 
an instrument being present. Is that an ex- 
perience ? I hold that it is ; and if a man 
comes in and says, " There is no music except 
what the violins make with the accompany- 
ing instruments," I turn to him as that great 
musician would, and say to him, " The concert 
pitch is not in the instrument, it is in the mind ; 
and we know when the orchestration is in per- 
fect accord by the registry of the consciousness 
in terms of thought, and not simply in terms 
of the auditory nerve." Take the eye as an il- 



38 One World at a Time 



lustration. I want to get my agnostic on the 
plane of intellect, and away from the plane of 
the senses. Take the eye as an instrument. The 
eye is a thing to see through ; it is not a thing 
to see with. It is a telescope, a microscope, if 
you please. The eye's spot is not behind my 
glasses, but from within the brain ; and a blow 
on the back of the head will produce blindness 
quite as certainly as a blow in the face. The 
instrument can be disfigured, and yet the vis- 
ions it has seen remain ! Let me with one 
single example show you what I mean. There 
was a beautiful story told of Helen Keller, 
and I sent to Helen Keller to know whether 
it were true. You know that Miss Keller, 
who is now a student in Radcliffe College, 
Harvard University, was, at the beginning, 
blind and dumb and deaf, absolutely. The 
painful, careful training by Miss Sullivan and 
those associated with her has made that young 
girl capable of taking her Latin and Greek ex- 
aminations for entrance into Radcliffe College, 
and has widened her information beyond that 
of most girls of her age. This is the story : 
They were very careful that she should never 
have any religion taught her, because they 
wanted to see whether there is an experience 
that does not depend upon sight or hearing 



The Agnostic 



39 



or speech, the ordinary avenues through which 
religion comes, — the reading of religious 
books, the hearing of argument, and talking 
with people of religious tendencies. That 
was shut away from her by intention. It is 
said that Phillips Brooks was brought finally 
to visit Helen Keller and to talk with her 
about the Fatherhood of God. And he spoke 
of God, our Father, as only he could speak, 
in terms so natural that God was brought 
near ; in terms so tender that she was not 
afraid ; in terms so real that it seemed a com- 
panionable thought ; and when he stopped, 
she turned her sightless eyes to him and said, 
in the language she had learned by painful ef- 
fort through the years, " Dr. Brooks, I have 
always known Him, but I did not know His 
name." Will my agnostic friend insist that 
there is not a field of experience that is within 
the horizons of the mind, helped only a little 
by the slightest contact, such as this girl had, 
with the external world ? 

One other suggestion. I insist that the ag- 
nostic must understand one thing most clearly, 
and it is this : the laws of the mind are as 
much laws of nature as the laws of matter. 
Indeed, I would be willing to say that they 
are more the laws of nature than the laws of 



40 One World at a Time 



matter. There is not a man so scientific, or 
so wise in his own conceit, that he would be 
able to demonstrate to anyone else whether 
spirit is a sublimation of matter, or matter is a 
precipitate of spirit. You do not know ; and 
you do not know, because there is not a man 
in the world who knows. Some people guess, 
but this is not a subject for conundrums ; it is 
a field for earnest questions. The conun- 
drum is a question the answer to which you 
have to guess, and in that it differs from the 
rational question, the answer to which some- 
body knows. I insist, therefore, that the laws 
of mind, the terms of consciousness, are the 
real terms, in which the world is known. 
Some reader of these pages may ask, " How 
do you know that there is another life?" I 
answer you now that I do not know. Then, 
he will probably say, " And are you a Christ- 
ian minister ? " And I will say, " I am a 
minister of a Christian Church, and I hope I 
am a Christian minister, but I would rather 
the congregation would testify to that." The 
fact is, the experientialist is right in that re- 
gard. It was that to which Huxley addressed 
himself. You cannot know that which you 
have not experienced, and another world, an- 
other life, is a thing that you cannot experi- 



The Agnostic 



41 



ence while you are occupied with this world 
and this life. If you ask me if I can make an 
argument for immortality, I will say with per- 
fect frankness, " Yes, I think I can make an 
argument, the probabilities of which are all on 
the side of remaining for ever a personality in 
God's world." I think I can make an argu- 
ment for that. This is not the time for it. 
But if you were dying, and you were to call 
me to your bedside and ask me whether I 
could guarantee you by proofs known to me 
that you should go out of what you call life 
into life for ever, — in spite of the desire in my 
mind to help you, — I must still say, I do not 
know. On that subject agnosticism is per- 
fectly justifiable, because it is outside the 
plane of experience. Now I believe I shall 
live for ever ; and I can argue that question 
down to the ground. You ask me if I know ; 
and the agnostic attitude is, I do not know, 
because it is not within the horizon of my ex- 
perience. The first reason for this is, that 
testimony is not evidence in this sense ; and 
all the religious books of the world might be 
piled one upon the other to say that men 
believed in the eternal life, in " the other life," 
as they are in the habit of calling it, — and 
yet, when you are through, you simply have 



42 One World at a Time 



accumulated testimony of extremely good peo- 
ple, who thoroughly believed, and lived in the 
terms of their belief, that they should never 
pass out of existence ; but it would not be 
evidence. What they know is the life that 
now is — they have the power to live in such 
sublime terms as to feel the promise of "the 
life to come." 

The second reason is this : the only way 
to find out about dying is to die, and nature 
seems to have arranged it so that after you 
have done that you cannot tell what the 
experience is. There may be among my 
readers people who believe profoundly in 
spirit communication, and I expect to hear 
from them on this subject. I want to say to 
them now, that I do not deny that perfectly 
plausible reports may have come to perfectly 
credulous people from " the other world," as 
they call it. I am prepared to say that ; but 
what I contend is, that you cannot know it 
as coming from the other world. Why ? 
Because you can only know it in terms of 
your own consciousness, and the moment 
you know it in terms of your present con- 
sciousness, you have to take the "other- 
world" tag off and put this world's tag on. 
That is the difficulty. The moment I know 



The Agnostic 



43 



it, I know it in terms of my present exper- 
ience, therefore it is not from the " other 
world" to me. 

The further reason touches the people that 
get these marvellous communications — which 
I do not deny ; I am agnostic with regard to 
them ; I do not know them, I have never 
had them. The only attempts made upon 
my credulity in that direction were so ridicul- 
ous and so inconclusive that when the partici- 
pants in the Sceance were through I asked 
them if I might have my inning, and they 
said I might. I said if they did n't mind, I 
would lead them in prayer, and I had a service 
of religion with those people. It seemed to 
be a shock to them, but it was a practical 
way. I thought that you might speak to the 
Cause of being with such confidence that all 
other questions were insignificant in compari- 
son. We must also remember the human 
mind is much less explored up to date than 
the continent of Africa. That is, we know 
more about the continent of Africa than 
about the human mind. When you get 
certain psychic results that are reported to 
you as having come from some " other world" 
you are not sure when you have heard it that 
it is not a report from some interior province 



44 One World at a Time 



of the human mind, from which some wan- 
derer of consciousness has come in to report 
his tribe and the conditions of their life as from 
an unexplored continent and an unknown tract 
of the world. That is the difficulty about the 
whole question ; and for that reason I insist 
that the plane of experience must be nar- 
rowed in that particular. You ask me — to be 
very personal — if I hold this view, that no 
man may know with respect to the future life, 
why it is that I hold firmly to my own belief 
that I shall never die, — I mean in the sense 
of being snuffed out like a candle. I do 
not expect to be snuffed out like candle, 
never to be relighted. Why am I not an 
agnostic with regard to that in the plane 
of my own belief ? For this simple reason. 
What I know is that I am alive. Every sense 
registers it. Think of it ! The sensory 
nerves, coming in contact with some external 
object, telegraph the central office in the brain, 
and the message goes back over the motor 
nerves, and an act follows. That goes on all 
the time. It only goes on, so far as we know, 
in living men and women. I know I am alive. 
It rests upon you to prove, if you deny that I 
shall live for ever, that I shall ever die. The 
consciousness of life is the present fact, and 



The Agnostic 



45 



I hold this relation to the life of God as se- 
curing it in the life of God ; and I hold more 
than that, — that the experience of life and 
the experience of the love of the Eternal 
and the sense of the Fatherhood of God, 
the sense of relationship between the child 
and God his Father, is so real that I cannot 
die unless God dies. I cannot understand 
how the Sum of Life can cut me off as 
dead. 

The best things in life are the things you 
do not know in the sense that the agnostic 
says they cannot be known. For instance in 
your own home you have a little child. When 
you come home from work, she climbs up 
upon your knee and you wonder whether she 
ought to ; you are dusty from the day's work, 
and you wonder what the mother will say 
if there is a speck on her best clothes ; but 
she climbs up just as if she were not afraid 
of dirt, and puts her arms around your neck 
and looking into your eyes, — tired eyes, tired 
with the moving panorama of the world, tired 
with straining all the acquisitive power of 
life to get enough to keep her living and 
get her educated and place her in life — she 
says, " Do you love me ? " And you say, 
" Why, yes." You do not have to argue that ; 



46 One World at a Time 



you know it ! You do not have to calculate 
and see whether you really love her. You 
can shut your eyes and love her. All the 
senses might have gone into oblivion for a 
moment, but you would love her. So you 
say " Yes." And she says, " So do I." And 
neither of you knows why. You could not 
tell anybody that asked you why. If you 
say that you love the child as the tigress 
loves her cub, as the eagle loves its young, 
I say to you that between the way in which 
a tigress in the cage will turn her cub over 
and lick it and paw it about and mumble it 
with every sign of motherly affection for it 
— the difference between that and what the 
woman does who nurses the child, and would 
die for it, separates these two by celestial dia- 
meters. They are not the same thing at all. 
The instinct of motherhood in the beast, and 
the instinct of spiritual affection in the wo- 
man, are as separate as two things can be. 
All the best things in life are the things we 
cannot prove, but they are things that dwell 
in the very consciousness and constitute the 
experience of sensitive souls. 



CHAPTER III 



THE BELIEVER 

WE come first of all to the importance of 
the subject itself. I hold, and have 
maintained throughout these pages, that re- 
ligion is a natural function of the human soul ; 
that it belongs to human nature ; that the man 
who has religion in excess is as ill-balanced as 
the man who has it deficiently. There is no 
reason why we should call a dwarf in religion 
a man, or why we should call a freak in religion 
a man ; because religion belongs in human na- 
ture in its place, proportioned to the other 
faculties of the human mind. It is not the 
sole business of man, but it is his business, 
nevertheless. The importance of the subject 
arises not only from the fact that religion is a 
natural function of the human creature, — that 
his soul is adjusted to the uses of its spiritual 
functions just as the eye to light, the ear to 
sound, and the lungs to atmosphere, — not only 
is this so, but the beleiver represents the only 

47 



48 One World at a Time 



operative class in the world of mind, namely 
the optimist. I believe there is a moral use in 
optimism that the pessimist never can reach ; 
that there is a moral function for the optimist 
which the cynic wholly ignores ; that the op- 
timist, the man who believes not that things 
are at their best, but that things are coming to 
their best, is the man who must of necessity 
be classed with the believers, as the pessimist 
must be classed with the deniers. I under- 
stand perfectly well — every man of experience 
must understand — that there is a nether side 
to life, that it is not all shining and brilliant, 
that it is not all fair and attractive. The man 
who says there is no nether side of life, no 
tragedy that is played without any interval be- 
tween the acts, no pathos that wrings the heart 
and drives men to despair, — the man who says 
there is no nether side of life, is not an optimist, 
he is an idiot. He does not understand that 
there is a side of the embroidery, however 
beautiful the pattern may be on its upper side, 
that when it is reversed seems disaster and 
contradiction, and the stitches all awry ; and 
yet the optimist and the believer belong to 
the same class ; they belong to the class 
that has in charge the moral triumph of the 
world. 



The Believer 



49 



Let us consider certain distinctions between 
the believer as the representative of faith, and 
what have been mistaken for aspects of his voca- 
tion. " Faith " is a much misunderstood word. 
It is supposed to be the prerogative of people 
who "get religion." I want to say here with 
great distinctness that you cannot " get reli- 
gion ; " you cannot get rid of it. It is in the fibre 
of your nature. It is part of your tissue. It is 
woven, interwoven, and complexly involved 
with the whole structure of the human mind. 
People get up in the morning and say, " Go to, 
now, I am going to get religion to-day." They 
are only going to change the costume of their 
thinking and their attitude of mind. When 
evening falls they will not have got any new 
thing whatever, except a new attitude toward 
some fancy of their own. So the word " faith," 
as thought to belong to the religious world 
alone, is misunderstood. I have said religion 
is a function of the human soul. Faith is the 
exercise of that function. There is a passage 
in the New Testament which declares that 
" faith is the substance of things hoped for, 
the evidence of things not seen." There is 
a better definition of faith given by a mod- 
ern man, more easily understood, more strik- 
ingly stated, it seems to me, less invested with 



50 One World at a Time 



mysticism, more practical to the common mind. 
He declares that " Faith is the conviction that 
in the universe there is something that corre- 
sponds to my best." That is the attitude of 
faith. " In the universe there is something 
that corresponds to my best." When I am at 
my best, the universe and I are in intimate 
correspondence. 

Let me give you an illustration of the uses 
of faith in other aspects than religious. Take 
the man who believes in himself. We all 
have to be on good terms with ourselves if we 
are to live comfortably in the world and do 
any good work. The man who hates himself 
has sapped the energy of his purpose in life. 
The discouraged man has to get over his 
discouragement before he does any good work. 
Self-respect is of the very essence of moral char- 
acter. The man who believes in himself is an 
example of faith as a natural function. He 
believes he is a man of destiny, that he is a 
man of power, of opportunity, that he has fac- 
ulties which he must seriously consider and 
constantly use. When his faith in himself is 
excessive, he is known as an egotist, — that is, 
he travels with the sign of the perpendicular 
pronoun all the time, and " I, I, I," stands 
as a kind of exclamation point of all the 



The Believer 



5i 



performance of his life. A most unpleasant 
man ! But he simply has faith in himself in 
excess, which is as genuine a faith as a man 
ever felt in moments of worship. He is his 
own idol, and worships at his own shrine. 

Take the man who believes profoundly in 
his fellows. He believes in the " essential 
dignity of human nature," as Dr. Channing 
would phrase it. He believes in the " sov- 
ereignity of the human mind " as George Will- 
iam Curtis would have said. He believes in 
the capacity of human nature for all good. 
He does not believe in man " as ruined, but as 
incomplete," and that he rises by continual 
ascent in a way that discounts and contradicts 
the old doctrine of the " fall of man." Man 
never fell. He has been rising since the be- 
ginning. This man believes in his fellows. 
They are his fellows ; they are not strangers 
to him, not alien. He lives the line in Ter- 
ence's play which electrified and astonished 
the Roman audience that first heard it, — " I am 
a man, and nothing that is human is foreign to 
me." This man believes in his fellows. We 
call him a lover of his kind, a philanthropist ; 
and he loves them so much that he is not part- 
icular that they shall be just his kind. He 
will allow them to be a variation from his 



52 One World at a Time 



kind, and love them still. He is an example 
of the exercise of faith in an object that is 
worthy of its bestowal. 

Carry now the exercise of faith to its limit 
as applied to the Infinite and Eternal. The 
believer, the man of faith, who has come into 
correspondence with the Ultimate Reality in 
the universe, who may call that Ultimate 
Reality by a name that is in no liturgy nor in 
any scripture, but who has projected his life 
upon the confidence that God is, by whatever 
name he may be known, — that man is exercis- 
ing the same faculty exactly as the man who 
believed in himself and the man who believed 
in his fellows ; but he is believing profoundly 
in that Ultimate Reality which in moments of 
divine communion he calls the Great Compan- 
ion, and in moments of revery seems to him 
the very palpitating heart of the universe it- 
self. He is a believer in God. Now if you 
dispute the term, I am not particular about it. 
To one who asked me if I was not playing 
fast and loose with that term, I gave the an- 
swer which I repeat now. I care nothing for 
the term. In all the world, no human being, 
from the most developed saint of any creed or 
kind or religion, down to the creature who 
bowing down before stock or stone worships 



The Believer 53 

there, was ever left unheard by the Being 
who made him. If the saint has his idea of 
God, and the savage his symbol, — the totem- 
stick, or whatever it may be, — that is simply a 
question not of religion but of development. 
The mystic, to whom God has no form nor 
name, simply represents the other antithesis, 
the extreme, the ultimate pole from this un- 
developed savage with his stone image or his 
totem-stick. He only represents religion in 
another aspect of its development. The name 
is never the Reality. It is for faith in that 
which is above all names I plead. 

Let us come to certain other distinctions. 
Faith is not synonymous with credulity. Cred- 
ulity is simply the open mouth of the sewer, 
with the lay of the land in that direction ; so 
that you only need a freshet to fill the drain. 
It may be clean water that runs in. It may 
be the very distilled snows of heaven. But 
still the open mouth receives it, unquestioning, 
and the transit of it from the conduit is unim- 
peded. That is the attitude of credulity, which 
accepts whatever it is asked to accept. It has 
an unfailing appetite and an unappeased curios- 
ity, and the sceptic is as likely to be credulous 
as any other man in the world. I will give you 
an illustration of the kind of thing that happens. 



54 



One World at a Time 



A woman said to me years ago : " I think it 
is about time my daughters were learning 
something about the Christian religion." I 
said I thought it would be a good plan. She 
proposed to send them to a class I was hold- 
ing, and said : " My daughters are so ignorant 
of the Christian religion that they asked me a 
question the other day that surprised me. 
They know all about other religions." I con- 
gratulated her, but I wanted to say that there 
were people, like Max Muller, who had studied 
all the Sacred Books of the East and would 
not claim that. She said : " My daughters 
asked me this question — ' Mother, who lived 
first, Moses or Jesus?'" "Well," I replied, 
" that was rather an astonishing question for 
grown-up people to ask." Just to try her as to 
this credulous attitude, — she was an excellent 
woman, full of all good works, and not full of 
good knowledge, — I added to her : " I would 
not have been surprised if your daughters had 
wondered who lived first, Jesus or Moham- 
med." " Oh," she said, "they could not have 
made that mistake. If there had been no 
Mohammed there could not have been any 
Christ." She was only six hundred years out 
of the way on the wrong side of the Christian 
Era. That is the credulous attitude of mind 



The Believer 



55 



that believes the new thing proposed the real 
thing, because it is so new it has not lost 
the tag off it yet. That is not faith. That 
person is not a believer. He is simply a man 
with a morbid appetite for receiving things 
without examination, without test. This man 
is not a believer, he is a mere receiver, whether 
his credulity be pseudo-scientific, the credulity 
of the man who reads the newspaper, or the 
credulity of a corrupt official, for instance, who 
believes all the things he wants to believe, or 
whether it be the credulity of the religious 
man, the man whose mind has been filled up 
with everything that comes to hand. The 
tip-cart of the world's knowledge has just been 
backed up to his mind and dumped in. He is 
not a man of faith. He is a man of varied 
and unassorted beliefs, and is not, therefore, 
in the best sense, a believer. That distinction 
must be made between faith and credulity. 

A distinction must also be made between 
faith and speculation. There is a speculative 
quality in the mind for which I have contended 
in these pages. The sceptic, as the inquirer, 
must have all things subject to him by way of 
stimulus to the desire to know. But the spec- 
ulative plane of thought is not the plane of 
the religious life. It is wholly different. Re- 



5° One World at a Time 



ligion is met upon the plane of the practical 
reason and not upon the plane of the speculat- 
ive intellect. The passage has to be made in 
theology from the plane of the speculative 
intellect to the plane of the practical reason, or 
you would never get applied Christianity or 
applied anything else in the name of religion. 
The trouble with the theological world has 
always been that it has been content to specu- 
late with infinite variety upon an infinite num- 
ber of subjects, about most of which no human 
being can know anything at all. The exercise 
has been immensely entertaining, but it has 
not built up the religious life. It has strength- 
ened the mind of the speculative reasoner 
because it has given what any mental exercise 
will give, increased power of concentration and 
ability to handle his own thought. But always 
before he was through, he had to make the 
descent from the plane of speculative reason- 
ing to the plane of practical reasoning. 

A distinction must be made also between 
the believer and the nominally religious man. 
There is a great contempt abroad for the 
" professor of religion." It is partly justified, 
and partly unjust. I have the good fortune 
to belong to a church that does not put any 
premium upon a mans making a profession 



The Believer 



57 



of religion. It puts a vast deal more empha- 
sis upon the character of the man, and the 
question of his alliance with a church of any 
form of faith that he is satisfied to assume 
is left entirely to his own private judgment. 
Still, I believe in the Church, or I would not 
be a minister of religion in charge of a church ; 
but I believe in the Church as an assemblage 
of people given over to an earnest devotion 
to the will of God, not an assemblage of peo- 
ple whom you can designate by the badge 
they wear or the phrase they use. In the Egyp- 
tian Book of the Dead, among the splendid 
passages that are written concerning the soul 
as it goes up to be weighed and passed on 
into the Courts of the Blessed, — in that ancient 
document, antedating by at least twenty-five 
hundred years probably by four thousand 
years, the era we call Christian, — this signifi- 
cant thing is added to all the other virtues : 
" he hath the right tone." It does not mean 
what we mean by a " high-toned" man, a man 
of right character. It means that he could 
say the holy things in the holy way. It 
means what old Betty Higden meant, in one 
of Dickens's stories, when she cuffs her son 
for reading the newspaper in a sing-song, and 
says : " How dare ye read the paper in the 



58 One World at a Time 

Bible twang ! " The Egyptian Book of the 
Dead means the man who can say the holy 
things in the holy way. That has gone out 
of use except in rare and isolated instances. 
There is only one tone for character and for 
religion together. So that the distinction 
must be made between the " professor of re- 
ligion " and the man of faith. Many a man 
of supreme faith has never been a professor of 
religion in the nominal and usual sense of 
that word. The deep, profound, earnest con- 
victions of life are not easily adjusted to the 
usual demands of the church as to its mem- 
bership or the articles of a creed. The pro- 
fessor of religion is not, therefore, in this 
statement, to be confused with the believer. 
He may belong under both designations, but, 
because he is despised by you, for instance, 
as a member of a church, he should not, there- 
fore, be dismissed without investigation as to 
whether he is really a believer or not ; and for 
this reason I come now to the major thing I 
desire to say to you. 

Religion, I have said, is a natural function 
of the human creature. It belongs to man. 
By virtue of it all art in its appeal to the 
aesthetic nature has its share in religion. 
It is safe to say that without it three things 



The Believer 



59 



would never have been for your edifica- 
tion, — the great works of sculpture and paint- 
ing in the graphic arts ; the great works of 
architecture, where religion was enshrined, 
sometimes buried ; and the third thing that 
would not have been left to you is the work 
of the musical world, most of which we should 
not have had but for the contribution of re- 
ligion to it ; and still a fourth thing — your 
boys would have no Latin and Greek classics 
to study in the schools if it had not happened 
that when Cassiodorus was secretary to the 
Eastern Emperor in the sixth century, he 
found on his hands a lot of monks, whom he 
set to work copying the Latin and Greek clas- 
sics, thus preserved to this age. So, even 
in the schools themselves there is this ser- 
vice done by religion as a servitor of man, 
creating and preserving art and literature 
in an age when the learned and servants of 
art were to be found only in the churches of 
Europe. 

The main reason for declaring for the be- 
liever as the exponent of religion is that the 
believer represents a quality in the mind rather 
than expression on the tongue. I am very 
anxious to have you understand that religion 
is not only natural, but is easiest handled and 



60 One World at a Time 

most potent when reduced to its simplest 
terms. Religion, faith as its expression, and 
the believer as its exponent, represent a quality 
of mind based in reverence. Is it not true 
that there is a grave danger that the quality of 
reverence shall disappear from the younger 
life of our time ? Things pass so readily be- 
fore the mind, so easily command the atten- 
tion, the world is so interesting, so various, 
so multiform, its industries are so many, its 
pressure is so great, that the meditative qual- 
ity, the brooding faculty, the power to take a 
thing and hold the mind over it until it in- 
cubates the egg of thought, until it brings the 
singing thing out of the egg that was in the 
nest of the moment, — that quality declines ever 
more and more in this time in which we live, 
in this land in which we live. The German 
child, the English child is more deferential than 
the American child. The American child has 
been a little nineteenth-century philosopher. 
The twentieth century is now on his hands, 
and he knows not what to do with it. He 
is deferred to, he is coddled, and cared for ; 
he has more playthings than he can play with ; 
he grows tired of the things heaped upon him. 
He lives in the rattle and bang of a great city 
perhaps, and grooves are made in his brain by 



The Believer 



61 



the mere impact of noise, until I have known 
children of the poorer East Side homes to 
whom the most dreadful thing in the world 
was silence ; they could not endure to be si- 
lent. It is the growing shame of every great 
city, the intolerable burden of men and women 
of the poorer class of the great city, that they 
never have the privilege of being alone ; which 
the human mind needs. The human mind 
needs to be alone with itself. It needs to be 
quiet and to brood and fashion its own life out 
of " reverence for the things that are above," 
as Goethe has said, " for the things that are 
around, and for the things below." That is an 
essential quality of the well-ordered mind. 
The things above provoke it to worship ; 
the things around produce in it the sense of 
fellowship ; reverence for the things below 
inspires it to the great compassions of life. 
Reverence is an essential quality of the well- 
ordered and normal mind, and the believer 
is dealing with the reverential quality in the 
mind. Your children are sometimes a surprise 
to you by what they say. You think them ir- 
reverent. No ; it is the wonder-element in 
.them, born of their very reverence. They live 
in a world of mythology, of fancy, of fairy 
stories. They say things about the Eternal 



62 One World at a Time 



that seem very comical and sometimes irrever- 
ent. But it is their very reverence that leads 
them to say these things, — that is, if they have 
been brought up under conditions of reverence 
in the household. That same wonder-element 
in the childhood of the race produced the mir- 
acle, produced the prophet, and religion for 
many and many a generation was supported 
upon the two great pillars of prophecy and of 
miracle. Take any of the old books about 
religion. You will find the argument for re- 
vealed religion to be that prophets prophesied 
what came to pass, and miracles were per- 
formed to prove that the prophecy was true. 
That is short and easy ; but it is not true. In 
the first place, most of the prophets were not 
prophesying ; they were talking about some- 
thing in their minds and hearts ; for their own 
time they were the statesmen of Israel, deal- 
ing with great state questions. For instance, 
the Book of Daniel, which has been regarded 
as a great prophecy, was not a prophecy. It 
was written about 160 b. c, and was a war doc- 
ument intended to inflame the patriotism of 
the Jews. The time came, however, when this 
structure of the temple of religion, standing 
upon its two pillars of miracle and pro- 
phecy, built out of the wonder-element in the 



The Believer 



63 



primitive mind, was entered, as the blind Sam- 
son entered the temple of Dagon, by the 
giant we know as Common-sense, ordinary rea- 
son, natural penetration ; as Samson came 
into the temple of the Philistines, and, led by 
his guide, the blind giant flung his arms about 
the two pillars on which the great temple was 
supported, bowed himself between them, and 
pulled the building down upon his enemies, 
so Common-sense entered into the temple 
of Religion, supported upon its pillars of 
miracle and prophecy, and bowed himself be- 
tween them, and they fell, and the literary 
world of criticism took up their fragments to 
examine them ; but the temple stood ! The 
temple stood ! Why ? Because it did not 
really rest on miracle and prophecy. It rested 
upon the profoundest convictions of the hu- 
man soul and the ultimate reality of the uni- 
verse ; and the theologians had come in and 
built up other supports in contradiction of the 
well-known architectural rule that you shall 
not put a support that does not sustain any 
weight. They built up these supports under 
the structure, and able scholars in divinity 
schools and in churches taught that miracle 
and prophecy were the props of the Christ- 
ian system. But the temple of religion was 



64 One World at a Time 



older than these artificial supports ; it was 
founded on human nature and buttressed in 
the needs of men. 

Still further, the believer represents not only 
an attitude of mind based on reverence, he re- 
presents a quality of life. 

I like those phrases, the " low-grade " man, 
and the ' 1 high-toned " man. I was speak- 
ing on a platform one night, and a 'cello, 
strung just as the musician had set it down, was 
standing behind me, and as I spoke I could 
hear it answer. Every tone of my voice was 
taken up by the tense strings of the musical 
instrument, which repeated behind me the 
thing I was saying to the audience. So is 
the high-toned man, strung to the tension of 
his greatest power ; he makes the music of 
the world by the virtues which he discourses 
to the world in which he is placed. He is 
high-strung, he is " high-toned." On the other 
hand, there is the man that is put together so 
loosely that I should suppose, when he was 
made he was made just out of ordinary tow, 
and they forgot to put in any twist. You 
have seen such a man. He will not bear 
a pounds strain. He frays out, pulls apart. 
He is just oakum that has ceased to be rope 
and can be used only as filling. As the 



The Believer 



65 



calker, with this frayed-out, tarred rope that has 
been brought into this fluffy condition, calks 
up the seams in the old ships hauled up for 
repair. That is the kind of man that cannot 
be religious ; he cannot be a believer until he 
gets over the condition of slackness of soul, of 
the loose quality of his mind. For religion is 
not something to be left, as men so super- 
ciliously say, to women and children. If the 
women had not cared for it it would not 
have lasted for men. It would not have been 
in the world to-day but for the essentially re- 
ligious quality in women. It was a right in- 
stinct in the Catholic Church that put in 
her place the mother of Christ as the repre- 
sentative of religion in an age when human 
nature was so meanly thought of that only 
a miraculous birth and a pure virgin could be 
the representatives of religion. No ; the time 
has gone by when we can leave religion to 
women and children. It takes a good deal of 
a man to be a believer, because of the quality 
of life that it involves. The reason that so 
few people are genuine believers is that the 
strain is so great — not upon credulity, but upon 
integrity. 

This brings me to a point to which I want 

your attention with all the fixedness that you 

5 



66 One World at a Time 



can command. A man who is a genuine 
believer has as a fundamental postulate in his 
thinking, the belief that this world is essentially 
moral. He believes in the essential integrity 
of the universe. The other type of man be- 
lieves that there is a " short cut across-lots." 
He thinks there is some indirect way by which 
he can achieve his ends. Whereas, if he is a 
business man he knows if that were true the 
business of the world would not last five years. 
The business world is built up, with all its de- 
fects, with all its want of commercial integrity, 
as we sometimes see it, — it is built up upon 
the abiding conviction that morality is an es- 
sential part of human life. Yesterday the busi- 
ness world did ninety-five per cent, of its work 
upon credit. If you were, because you dis- 
believed in common integrity, to call back, 
during this new century upon which we have 
entered, the whole business of the world to a 
cash basis, you would destroy the commerce 
of this country before the year was out. No ; 
it is because human nature is essentially de- 
pendable ; because the universe is essentially 
moral ; because the vast majority of people are 
really honest, that the great mass of business 
in the world every day of the world's life is 
done upon a system of credit. 



The Believer 



67 



The common belief in the integrity of man 
must be carried through and applied to the 
universe at large. The universe is man's 
home. If man himself is essentially honest, as 
I believe he is ; if he is essentially right, as I 
believe he is, the universe must be of the same 
kind. His environment and himself must 
come together on even terms. I believe that 
the only solution of life is on the basis that the 
universe from core to rim, from centre to cir- 
cumference, is moral through and through. 
In your school life you learned this axiom : 
" A straight line is the shortest distance 
between two points." It is just as true in 
morals. You learned that " The whole cannot 
be greater than the sum of all its parts." It is 
just the same in morals. You learned that 
" Two things equal to the same thing are equal 
to each other." These mathematical axioms 
that are the very substance and foundation of 
the science of geometry are also axiomatic in 
the moral world. Directness of intention, sin- 
cerity that is crystalline and clear — these are 
qualities a man must have in a universe he 
believes to be moral. He can so be a believer ; 
and not on any other terms whatever. 

I want to call your attention, finally, to cert- 
ain conditions under which the believer lives. 



68 One World at a Time 



The first is a sense of proportion. I belong 
to a class of people — ministers of religion — 
who I suppose show the gravest defect in this 
particular of any class in the world. The 
ministry of religion has been said to be con- 
scientiously and consistently disproportionate 
in its thinking. For instance, it has empha- 
sised the other world and not this. It has 
emphasised the spiritual and not the natural ; 
revelation and not Nature ; miracle and not 
common force ; prophecy, and not plain sense ; 
prayer and not work. It has emphasised death 
and not life, and feels that its churches are 
more to be maintained than the truth. 
Let the ministry work out its own salvation. 
Sometimes it will be saved because it is really 
true. Sometimes it will have to take refuge, 
probably, in the general amnesty that is given 
to unconquerable ignorance. But in the com- 
mon mind, in the average layman, if he is to 
be a believer in a world that is worth living in, 
the sense of proportion must have a promin- 
ent place in the ordering of his thinking. 

Proportioned thinking, giving to every phase 
of life and character its due proportion, is ac- 
companied, in the next place, by crystalline 
sincerity. You cannot believe anything that is 
worth believing which has to do with character 



The Believer 



69 



until you have purged your mind of all cant. 
Never say the thing that you do not believe. 
Never think the thing that you cannot summon 
before the bar of reason and adjudge its place 
and value. Never use an influence that you 
do not want used for you. Take no attitude 
toward the great realities for another mind 
that you would not assume for yourself. Take 
no attitude for yourself that you would not be 
willing to be found in if God should call you 
that moment to your account. You say these 
are high qualities. They are not too lofty for 
a man to claim for himself. A man knows 
whether he is a clean man or not. A man 
knows whether he is dealing with things in a 
shifty way or not. He knows whether he is 
using words in two senses or only in the sense 
in which they can be used. He knows whether 
he is shuffling and shifty in the attitude he has 
toward life. He has a right to say that he is 
absolutely and entirely sincere in his own judg- 
ment ; and he cannot believe anything that is 
worth believing unless he is. It is not worth 
while for a man to live who has a debate with 
himself for ever, who has to arrange all the 
things he has ever said or thought, before he 
can say the next thing. That is a farce with- 
out being interesting, — the worst kind of a 



70 One World at a Time 



farce ever put on the boards. The secret of 
the directness of Jesus of Nazareth was that 
he had no debate with himself. When they 
said to him, " Shall we pay tribute to Caesar or 
no ? " he said, " Show me a coin." And they 
showed him a denarius. He said, " Whose 
image and superscription is this ? " They said, 
" Caesar's." Then he said, " Give unto Caesar 
the things that are Caesar's, and unto God the 
things that are God's." 

There was a man in the synagogue who had 
a withered hand, so the story says, and they 
watched Jesus whether he would heal him on 
the Sabbath day. Think of their state of 
mind, that they watched the Great Benefactor 
to know if he would be kind to a helpless crip- 
ple on the Sabbath day ! He, perceiving their 
thought, said unto the man, " Stand forth." 
Then turning to that group of people whom he 
knew, he said, " Is it right to do good or evil 
on the Sabbath day, to save life or to kill ? " 
And they answered him not a word. That 
was a straightforward question that could be 
answered by sincere minds, and they were not 
up to it. They held their peace. The story 
goes on to say that the helpless man was told 
to stretch forth his withered hand. You can 
see the palsied hand pointing out uncertainly 



The Believer 



7i 



into that audience which could not answer a 
straightforward question. And the Master 
said to him, " Go unto thy home. Thou art 
healed." That was the way in which he dealt 
directly with men, because he had no debate 
with himself. He had not to ask himself 
whether he thought so and so, before he could 
say what he thought to other men. 

So I leave with you this subject of The 
Believer, hoping that you belong to the great 
multitude of those who are profoundly be- 
lievers in something that is worth while. If 
you ask me where you shall begin, I say, Be- 
gin with these three qualities, two of which I 
have already named. First, begin by putting 
the emphasis in life where it belongs, in due 
proportion. Begin by dealing with yourself in 
terms of absolute sincerity, and then add to 
that a passion for righteousness that shall leave 
you a believer in the essential righteousness of 
the universe, although you may doubt every 
proposition that has ever been proposed by the 
Church of God. A passion for righteousness 
is the very essence of faith, — a faith that is 
represented in the Beatitude as " hunger and 
thirst for righteousness." Fronting the cen- 
tury of promise, and looking back over the cen- 
tury that has been a century of emancipation, 



72 



One World at a Time 



not for the slave only, but for the human 
mind — standing here and looking out upon the 
new century, give the weight of your faith to 
the idea of being faithful ; give the emphasis 
of your mind to the Ultimate Reality that is in 
the universe, and is the substance and sum of 
its life ; give your love and labour to that, 
and whenever the time shall come in which 
you answer the roll-call, saying, " I am here," 
you shall be able to look into the faces of 
those that are about you unashamed, because 
at least one thing in life you believed pro- 
foundly and fully, and followed it to the end. 



CHAPTER IV 



FROM THE SERMON ON THE MOUNT 
TO THE NICENE CREED 

FROM the earliest apprehension of God as 
actual to the final conclusion that " God 
is All " the ascent of the mind is immense. It 
constitutes the history of the soul's life. In the 
passage from worship as fear to worship in love 
one marks the development from polytheism 
to monotheism. The Jews, a people of re- 
ligious genius, accomplished this passage early, 
and they maintain its conclusion still. The 
Semite rises out of polytheism to the concep- 
tion that God is One. The Aryan rises out 
of a terrestrial polytheism to a polytheism no 
less evident though celestial. To the Semite 
one God is an intellectual certainty and a 
moral inspiration. To the Aryan many gods 
are a necessity and a hindrance to ethical 
unity. The Jew, the finest product of the 
Semitic stock, raises his hands in prayer and 
utters his creed : " Hear, O Israel, the Lord 
our God, the Lord is One." 

73 



74 



One World at a Time 



The supreme flower of the Jewish genius 
for religion was Jesus of Nazareth. He was a 
Jew in body, in mind, and in motive ; a Jew 
after the pattern of those sturdy defenders of 
spirituality in religion, Amos, Micah, Joel, and 
Isaiah ; a Jew appearing in a time of decay of 
spiritual worship to declare that God is Spirit ; 
a Jew surveying the formalism of his age to 
declare that " the pure in heart shall see God " ; 
a Jew renewing the ancient hope of God's 
Kingdom and its Messiah, but declaring : " It 
cometh not with outward show but is within 
you " ; a Jew suspected of making innovations 
upon the ancient faith, but answering him who 
asks for the " greatest of all commandments " 
in the words he had repeated each day in the 
worship of the synagogue in his native village, 
" Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord 
is One. And thou shalt love the Lord thy 
God with all thy heart, and with all thy mind, 
and with all thy soul, and with all thy strength. 
This is the first and great commandment." 
The second is this, "Thou shalt love thy 
neighbour as thyself." Jesus made the sayings 
of the Jewish fathers the groundwork of his 
teaching. The Sermon on the Mount and the 
Lord's Prayer may be found substantially in 
the aspirations of the devout prophets and 



God is One 



75 



psalmists of Israel. Jesus, like the other great 
prophets of his race, arraigned the narrowness 
of religious dogma, and tested it by the breadth 
of religious need. He contradicted only to 
enlarge. He made innovations only as the 
pioneer fells a forest to plant a field. That 
which does not seem Jewish in the words of 
Jesus was the Jew fulfilled, enlarged, and 
sublimated. 

Christianity, then, was Jewish in origin and 
essence. That it ceased to be Jewish in ex- 
pression was the accident of history, not the 
purpose of its founders. Jesus, Paul, and 
Simon Peter, with all that noble company ac- 
counted the apostles of the religion of Jesus, 
when they were most emphatic for the uni- 
versality of religion, spoke as Jews. The words 
ascribed to the Master phrased the conviction 
of the disciples, " Salvation is of the Jews." 
It was well for Paul that he had been a dweller 
in Tarsus, for he knew what it was to be a 
Roman born and a Greek by association ; but 
in religion he was so narrow a Jew that he 
persecuted those who were disciples of the 
larger Hebrew faith. When the struggle came 
between the religion of Jesus, the Son of Man, 
and the religion of the temple of the sons of 
Israel it was Paul's declaration, " After the 



76 One World at a Time 



manner which they call heresy, worship I the 
God of my fathers." The test of orthodoxy 
is thus declared to be spiritual communion. 
This is the key-note of Christianity — that it 
finds its ground of being in God. It is Unit- 
arian in its origin, since it is Jewish and there- 
fore monotheistic ; it is a divine impulse from 
the life of Jesus of Nazareth, the Hebrew, 
which finds its source in God's unity, its ex- 
pansion in man's brotherhood, its inspiration 
in man's relation to God the Father, and its 
mission in revealing the Father to His children 
who " ignorantly worship " him. The Greek 
Aryan, with his "gods many and lords many," 
was to find in the unity of God the ultimate 
fact of his philosophy and the justification of 
his ethics. The conversion of the world to 
Christ was an effort to reduce the confusion 
of the Aryan Pantheon to unity of worship 
in the religion of Jesus, the Semite. The 
Scriptures of the new faith were Jewish, every 
line. The teachers of the faith were at first 
Jewish, every one. The philosophy of life, at 
once simple and strong, was the conception 
of a Galilean. Essential Christianity is essen- 
tially Jewish ; therefore, essential Christianity 
is Unitarian. 

The history of the Unitarian idea, from the 



God is One 



77 



Sermon on the Mount to the Nicene Creed, 
can be traced here only in outline. We must 
throughout remember that the absorbing zeal 
of a true Hebrew gave it birth that the uni- 
versalism of Paul the Hebrew set it free ; that 
the hope of the coming Messiah held it to- 
gether and the Unity of God and the Brother- 
hood of Man afforded it motive for worship 
and communion. Let us pass in brief review 
the processes which confused its simplicity, 
and substituted at length, in the fourth cent- 
ury, a metaphysical speculation for the re- 
ligion of Jesus, and thus introduced the great 
Apostasy. 

The first break away from Jewish origins 
which appears (in the Book of Acts) is the 
appointment of the seven deacons " to serve 
tables." All the names are Hellenic. We 
must take account of the classes first affected 
by the new movement. There were the Jews 
by birth and religion, who were Palestinian 
as to residence and Aramaic in language ; 
or Alexandrian as to residence and Greek in 
language. There were those who were Greeks 
by birth and Jews in religion, — "proselytes 
of righteousness." In the third place come 
those who were Greeks by birth and re- 
ligion, — converts from paganism to the new 



78 



One World at a Time 



faith. Here is the material for the contro- 
versy which appears in the Book of Acts 
of the Apostles and in the Epistle to the 
Galatians as a conflict between the believers 
in Paul's gospel and the Jerusalem-party — 
those who insisted upon the universality of 
religion and those who admitted that it might 
become universal but must be Jewish first. 
The struggle was maintained until the de- 
struction of the centre of worship at Jeru- 
salem made all authority turn upon ideas, 
unsupported by appeal to holy places and 
their associations. But the contention still 
survived in the Judaic sects, not so much 
heretical as narrow, " who still sought to 
particularise and contract Christianity, as 
Gnosticism enlarged it to vagueness." Several 
well-defined claims were now put forth, all 
Jewish in origin. Of the most important, 
the Messiahship of Jesus, Baur well says : 

" Had not the Messianic idea — the idea in which Jew- 
ish national hopes had their profoundest expression — 
fixed itself on the person of Jesus and caused him to 
be regarded as the Messiah who had come for the 
redemption of his people, and in whom the promise 
of the fathers was fulfilled, the belief in him could 
never have had a power of such far-reaching influence 
in history. It was in the Messianic idea that the 



God is One 



79 



spiritual contents of Christianity were clothed with 
the concrete form in which it could enter on the path 
of historical development. The consciousness of Jesus 
was thus taken up by the national consciousness and 
enabled to spread and become the general conscious- 
ness of the world." 

If it be asked how could such a hope, local 
and national to the Jew, be transferred to 
Greek minds, we are reminded of several well- 
established facts, (i) The great body of Ro- 
mans and Greeks converted to Judaism in the 
century preceding our era had given Judaism 
a singular and significant place in the Roman 
Empire. It was a religion allowed and set 
apart, literally assigned the place it claimed ; 
whatever enthusiasm stirred its heart would 
make its pulsation felt throughout the Roman 
world. In the first century of our era Alex- 
andria, Rome, and other great metropolitan 
centres were as Jewish as New York is to- 
day. (2) Ethically disquieted, the Roman 
world looked with hope for a deliverance 
answering to human need, correlative to the 
national hope of the Jew, to whom all ques- 
tions were centred in religion ; the human- 
ity of the Greek, which found expression in 
philosophy and art, in the Jew blossomed into 
psalm and prophetic writing. " Great hopes 



8o One World at a Time 



are for great souls." This was a people 
chosen from above for the purposes of God, 
because moved from within for the uses of 
religion according to a genius which was in 
its inception Jewish, but has been found in 
its expansion simply human. (3) To any 
who might inquire what had become of the 
" Messianic-hope " the answer was always 
ready, that it had been pushed forward to 
the " second advent." The chief inspiration 
of Jew, Hellene, and Roman convert now 
became an ardent hope for the reappearing 
of Christ in the clouds of heaven to introduce 
a millennial reign. Already the wholesome 
conceptions, of the Jewish king who should 
rule in righteousness, of the chosen people 
who should constitute Messiah in a corporate 
Israel, and of the great Deliverer of those 
who would live in the Spirit, had taken on 
world-large proportions and in one of the 
earliest of the Christian documents find such 
expression as this : 

" Then cometh the end, when he shall deliver up the 
kingdom unto God, even the Father ; when he shall 
have abolished all rule and all authority and power. 
For he must reign, till he hath put all his enemies under 
his feet ; the last enemy that shall be abolished is 
death. And when all things have been subjected unto 



God is One 



81 



him, then shall the Son also himself be subjected to 
Him that did put all things under him, that God may 
be all in all " (i Cor. xv. 24-28). 

In many forms these words of Paul are re- 
peated for three hundred years ; they are the 
Messianic hope of the Jew taking shape as 
the universal hope of the Church. 

In view of this second advent, the Parousia, 
martyrdom became a virtue, marriage an in- 
convenience, and personal possessions a hind- 
rance. But however the Messianic idea may 
change, there has been no change in the mono- 
theism of the religion of Jesus. The Jew had 
never declared that the Messiah would be God. 
Between Jehovah and Messiah there was all 
the distance between the Ineffable and Un- 
approachable and the king of Israel whom 
He ordained for righteous rule ; the Messiah 
was never to be an object of worship, or in 
any sense supernatural. Those who fixed 
their eyes upon the clouds, looking for the 
second advent, in ascribing a nature not sim- 
ply human to Christ in no way exalted him 
to the place of God ; the subordination of the 
Son to the Father survives, as crucial and 
invariable beneath all efforts to phrase his 
nature and define his being. However large 
his figure grows ; however insufficient his 

6 



82 One World at a Time 



earthly parentage appears ; however necessary 
to the imagination his miraculous birth seems 
to be to account for his power and character ; 
however the pendulum of faith swings from 
the belief in the reality of his humanity to the 
belief in that humanity as the mere phantom 
and apparition in which the Father appears to 
suffer, no Father of the Church for three hun- 
dred years lost sight of the distinction be- 
tween absolute Deity and its representation 
in the terms of human life ; always the Son 
is subject to the Father. The monotheism 
survives strongly in all the deliverances con- 
cerning the Being of God. The Synod of An- 
tioch rejects and condemns the term 
(consubstantial) as used by Paul of Samosata 
to indicate the identity of substance between 
the Father and the Son ; and though, in the 
next century, the Council of Nicaea returned 
to it as the test of orthodoxy, it left its testi- 
mony to the subordination of Christ to God in 
the Nicene Creed in the terms, " Very God 
out of Very God." 

If we turn to the Shepherd of Hernias 
we find such statements as this : " First of all, 
believe that there is one God, who created 
and formed all things out of nothing. He 
comprehends all and is alone not to be 



God is One 



83 



comprehended (limited by definition), who can- 
not be defined in words, nor conceived by the 
mind." This is a favourite passage with Iren- 
seus, as we might expect, with Origen in the 
third century, and in the fourth century with 
Athanasius, to whom has been ascribed a doc- 
trine of a Trinity of which he never dreamed. 

This, then, is clear, through all intricacies 
of doctrine, that the absolute Being of God re- 
mains untouched by the growing claims of 
Christ. If the cause of this be sought, it is to 
be found in the unmistakable Jewish enthus- 
iasm for the Eternal which penetrates the ex- 
pressions looking to subordination of the Son. 

To Clement of Rome, " Christ is sent forth 
from God and the Apostles are from Christ ; 
both came of the Will of God in the ap- 
pointed order." So in "the Teaching of the 
Twelve" God is " the Almighty Maker," and 
Jesus "his servant." Clement's Epistle to the 
Corinthians bears rich testimony to the Script- 
ures of the Old Testament and quotes the 
precepts of the New. He proves the resur- 
rection, not by referring Deity to Christ, but 
by the analogy of the Phcenix, as Herodotus 
and Pliny tell the tale of its return from 
death. 

Polycarp, to whom we owe, according to 



84 One World at a Time 



Harnack, " an instance singular in history of 
a chain of unbroken tradition," is saturated 
with the New Testament spirit in his letter to 
the Philippians. It would seem an echo of 
Paul, when we read Polycarp's blessing of the 
Church : " God and Father of our Lord Jesus 
Christ, and he himself who is an everlasting 
High Priest, the Son of God, even Jesus 
Christ, build you up in faith and truth." 

In the Gospels and the Epistles, the strong 
monotheistic tone of all the utterances is to 
be noted ; even in the Apocryphal documents, 
and especially in the Fathers of the second 
century, we get the same insistence upon the 
absolute Being of God. How this was pene- 
trated by the suggestions which later de- 
veloped into a vague tritheism we will notice 
later on. 

If we turn to the Teaching of the Twelve 
a late-discovered second-century document, or 
even to the catechetical instruction in the 
Alexandrian churches, we have the clearest 
proof that the magnifying of Jesus Christ has 
in no way obscured the supreme object of 
worship. I quote from the instructions of the 
Alexandrian catechumens : " I believe in one 
true God, the Father Almighty, and in His only 
Son our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, and 



God is One 



85 



in the Holy Spirit who giveth life." At the 
close of the third century, this doctrine of 
" subordination " holds its place, though much 
overlaid by later thought : 

" I pledge myself to Christ and I am baptised in the 
faith of the one Supreme Uncreated God, in Jesus 
Christ, by whom the universe was created and formed, 
and from whom all things proceed. I believe in the 
Lord Jesus, His only Son, the first born of all creation, 
begotten before the ages by the good pleasure of the 
Father, not created, by whom all things in heaven and 
earth were made, visible and invisible. In the last 
times he descended from heaven and took upon him 
our flesh. He was born of the Virgin Mary. He lived 
holily and blamelessly in the world, walking in all the 
commandments of his God and Father" 

The earliest Christian inscription of any 
length which we have is the epitaph upon the 
tomb of Abercius, Bishop of Hieropolis, dis- 
covered by Mr. Ramsay in 1882. It is signi- 
ficant as a survival of the faith of the second 
century near its close : 

" I, the citizen of a chosen city, made this in my life- 
time, that in due season I may have a resting place for 
my body. Abercius by name, I am a disciple of the 
pure shepherd who feeds his herds of sheep on the mount- 
ains and plains, who has great eyes that look on all 
sides ; for he taught me faithful writings, who sent me 
to royal Rome to see it, and to see a golden-robed, gold- 
en-sandalled Queen, and there, too, I saw a people that 



86 One World at a Time 



has the bright seal. And I saw the plain of Syria and 
all the cities, even Nisbis, crossing the Euphrates, and 
everywhere I had companions. With Paul I followed 
and Faith led me everywhere, and everywhere served up 
to me for food a fish [the cryptogram for Christ] from 
the fountain, very large, pure, which a pure Virgin 
grasped, and she [Faith] gave this to friends to eat con- 
tinually, having excellent wine, giving the mixed wine 
with bread. These words, standing by, I, Abercius, bade 
to be thus inscribed. I was truly living my seventy- 
second year. Let every fellow-Christian who reads this 
pray for me." 

This is not simply curious, coming so late 
in the nineteenth century from the close of the 
second century, but it is instructive also as 
showing how simple were the phrases in which 
Christ, the Church, baptism, and the Lord's 
Supper were conveyed. It is the undogmatic 
age to which belong the last of the Apostolic 
Fathers and the Confessors. It is the century 
of Ignatius, Justin Martyr, and Irenaeus. It is 
not yet conscious that the Good Shepherd has 
" two natures " or is God, or that the simple 
Christian meal is a mystic sacrifice. The dox- 
ology of Flavian of Antioch had not yet been 
heard in any church. Men did not yet " shout 
forth Glory be to the Father and to the Son 
and to the Holy Spirit." This, according to 
Philostorgius, was new to the Church, which 



God is One 



87 



before that time had used the form, " Glory 
be to the Father through the Son in the Holy 
Spirit. Though some also said, ' Glory be to 
the Father in the Son and in the Holy Spirit.' " 
The Church was still dependent upon " the 
heart, which believeth unto righteousness," 
rather than upon nice distinctions of the spec- 
ulative intellect. 

But already, in the Christian "gnosis" of the 
second century, a process was at work that was 
to prepare a soil congenial to the tangled crop 
of dogma which would cover the third century 
with its rank growth. The Gnostics, whom 
the Church repudiated, had infected the Church 
itself with their methods, though in the school 
of Philo, and in the Rabbinical science of num- 
bers, a strong tendency had prepared for the 
change. We find the Old Testament searched 
for allusions to the growing Christ ology of the 
Church. Wherever " Wisdom " is spoken of, 
it is the Logos doctrine of the New Era ap- 
pearing in the ancient writings. Wherever it 
is possible to find a reference to "wood," it 
prefigures the cross ; the " stone " is Christ 
himself ; the pastoral psalms are full of the 
Good Shepherd, and the sorrows of Messiah 
are located in Gethsemane and on Calvary. 
The Eternal Reason, which the Hebrew makes 



88 One World at a Time 



to dwell always where the Eternal One is, 
teaches the pre-existence of Christ. To our 
age many of these constructions are not only 
false in exegesis and far-fetched in meaning, 
they are also known to be false readings of the 
Septuagint Scripture by Greeks ignorant of 
Hebrew. 

The text of an ancient writing begins to 
claim the first place in the attention of the 
Fathers of the Church ; and those who depend 
upon the Old Testament, repudiating the 
pagan writings, match in ingenuity of inter- 
pretation those who quote Homer, Plato, and 
Hesiod, as did Justin, and, later, Origen. The 
second century is preparing its doctrine of In- 
spiration, which will grow narrower and nar- 
rower, until the fourth century shall declare 
the sublimest utterances of antiquity "a doc- 
trine of devils " unless they arose in the He- 
brew mind. 

The strong anti-Jewish temper of the Church 
in the second and third centuries, which re- 
pudiated the Nazarenes, the Ebionites, and all 
the Judaic survivals of the simple religion of 
Jesus, was guilty of that strange inconsistency 
which the Church still perpetuates, of despis- 
ing the very sources of the Scriptures upon 
which it hangs in helpless servility. The 



God is One 



89 



Hebrew genius for religion produced for these 
early centuries the Word of God, and enriched 
the nations to whom, on their own theory of 
Revelation, God had never spoken. 

The essential and absolute being of God 
became more and more difficult of apprehen- 
sion. An instrument of creation was de- 
manded by the popular imagination. Already 
in Egypt the material for this idea was ready 
to hand ; the Greek Cosmogony supplied its 
share ; and the Demiurge of the Gnostics and 
the Logos of the Orthodox contended for the 
mastery ; often there was but little to choose 
between the one and the other theory as it 
was worked out by its partisans. This creat- 
ive agent is not one and the same at all 
times ; sometimes it is the Son, sometimes 
Wisdom, sometimes the Holy Spirit. So late 
as the time of Gregory Nazianzen, a.d. 390, 
we find diversity of view concerning the Holy 
Spirit. He says : " Some of our theologians 
regard the Spirit as a mode of the Divine 
operation ; others as a creation of God ; others 
as God Himself ; others again say they know 
not which of these opinions to accept, from 
their reverence for Holy Scripture, which says 
nothing about it." 

These later speculations did not belong to 



90 One World at a Time 



the Apostolic Fathers. The Apostolic Age 
set itself just two problems and no more : it 
was intent upon purifying society ; and it was 
intent, as a means to this end, on proclaiming 
the Supreme God as the object of worship, 
revealed in his servant Jesus so clearly as to 
make him seem the Son of God, " only begot- 
ten." Vice and polytheism found their an- 
tagonists in a faith which proclaimed, " Hear, 
O Israel, the Lord the Eternal, the Eternal is 
One," and then summoned to that purity of 
heart which was to be the preparation to see 
God. This, and no more, was the essential 
message of Jesus Christ to the age called 
apostolic, as they understood it ; the adjust- 
ment of human relations upon the terms of a 
Love which in God is Fatherhood, and in 
man is brotherhood. It was not an age of 
dogma. They were to " do God's will " as a 
means of knowing any teaching to be author- 
itative. There was no consensus of opinion. 
There was the freest and most inexact recital 
of the incidents of the life of their Master. 
They were not yet so far separated from their 
Jewish beginnings as to excite recognition as 
a new religious cult. The Christian guild, as 
a Jewish organisation, was tolerated long after 
Greek and Roman guilds had been prohibited. 



God is One 



91 



When we pass to the Martyr Age we find 
that we have not yet reached the age of 
dogma. Still it is believed that the sanctity 
of high courage and consistent purpose takes 
precedence of the " form of sound words." 
The martyrs did not die to vindicate a body 
of doctrine ; they were sacrificed sometimes at 
the instigation of personal hatred and private 
spite, sometimes through suspicion of their 
secret assemblies, which in the case of the 
Roman and Greek guilds had been forbidden 
by law. Sometimes the enthusiasm for death 
made them rush upon martyrdom, goading to 
violence a government unwilling to sacrifice 
its subjects. Sometimes the necessity of pro- 
viding actors in the gladiatorial shows and 
cruel sports of the amphitheatre made a levy 
upon the " suspects " a convenient resource. 
Sometimes the government referred to these 
proscribed ones the pestilence or famine for 
which a superstitious age could not account 
by natural causes. Some are surprised that 
the best emperors were the keenest persecut- 
ors ; but the Roman idea of the State made 
it inseparable from religion ; disloyalty was 
atheism, and the feeling as to any independ- 
ent organisation within the State is reflected 
in the saying of Marcus Aurelius : " What is 



92 One World at a Time 



not useful to the swarm is not useful to the 
bee ! " 

From whatever motive, when Carthage, 
Smyrna, Antioch, Rome, or the churches of 
Gaul furnished " confessors " to death, none 
of them died who were willing to curse Christ 
or sacrifice to the image of the Emperor. 
Such a sacrifice was never interpreted as a 
disbelief in the ultimate Deity to whom Christ- 
ian and Roman referred religion in its last 
analysis. There was no examination in the 
terms of theology which a later age vainly 
sought to identify with Christian faith. The 
martyrs of the second century would have 
died as readily upon the demand to believe in 
a Trinity as they would upon the demand to 
believe in the Pantheon of Roman divinities. 
The Emperor was to them a man to be argued 
with, as the Apologies of Justin, Tatian, and 
Origen show ; worship of him was forbidden 
by their belief in the Eternal One and their 
adoration of the purity of His Son, Jesus 
Christ. This age of the martyrs speaks in 
the words of Ignatius of Antioch, 115 a.d. ; 
he beseeches his friends at Rome not to in- 
terfere, by petitions for his release : 

" I am fearful of your love lest it injure me. For you 
it is easy to do whatsoever you please, but for me it is 



God is One 



93 



difficult that I should attain God if indeed you do not 
spare me. For I shall not have such an opportunity to 
attain God ; nor will ye, if ye now be silent, ever have 
the benefit of a better work. If ye keep silence about 
me I shall become God's speech, but if ye love my body 
I shall be again an echo of myself. It is well that I set 
from the world to God, that I may rise with Him. I am 
God's wheat, and by the teeth of the beasts am I ground, 
that I may become God's pure bread." 

The passage from the fathers of the faith to 
the Fathers of theology is made by Justin Mar- 
tyr (a.d. 163), naturally, for he was a student 
of philosophy, and a Greek, though born in 
Samaria. Henceforward religion will express 
itself in the terms of philosophy, borrowed 
from Greek, Roman, and Oriental sources. 
Even its martyrs will make their Confession 
in philosophical terms ; and emperors will 
eventually cast in their lot with one party or 
the other in the debate of the schools. The 
strenuous faith of early Christianity will soon 
be overcome by the strident declamation of 
controversy. 

The very protests of the so-called heretics 
are as instructive as the trend of authority 
against which the protests were made. Marcion 
(a.d. 130-180) leads a revolt from philosophy 
in favor of a religion of the New Testament. 
He is so persuaded of the benignity of the 



94 One World at a Time 



Father as Jesus taught of Him, that he cannot 
identify Him with the Jehovah of the Old 
Testament. Jehovah may be a God for the 
Jews, but he is not the Father of Jesus. The 
Jew's God was, perhaps, a just God, but the 
God of Jesus was love. The passage to dual- 
ism is easy. The supposition of subordinate 
gods to account for evil is natural. The 
charge of Gnosticism was early made against 
Marcion ; Marcion and Basilides were certainly 
the best of the Gnostics. The cardinal points 
of Marcion's system are these : (i) The Su- 
preme God, who is absolutely good, cannot 
possibly enter into any union with matter ; the 
material world cannot, therefore, have been 
created by God, but it is the work of an infe- 
rior being, who is ever in conflict with matter 
but cannot overcome it. (2) The Supreme 
God has once, and once only, revealed Himself, 
in Christ ; Christ and Christ's religion are 
therefore, for man, the only possible manifest- 
ation of the absolute good. (3) Absolute 
goodness consists in love and love only. Just- 
ice, or the retributive principle, is in its nature 
opposed to love, and therefore cannot be 
affirmed of the Supreme God. 

Marcion's disciple, Hermogenes, attempted a 
solution no more logical but more poetic : 



God is One 



95 



the Eternal One attracts out of chaos order 
and life as by a creative attraction analogous 
to that of beauty upon the mind of man, or, as 
Aristotle says, " He influences it as the be- 
loved object influences the lover." Creation 
is progressive from eternity ; matter eternally 
opposes, and is eternally attracted into, form 
and life ; moral evil occurs when this attrac- 
tion is successfully resisted. Irenaeus and 
Tertullian opposed to this the orthodox no- 
tion that God created all things out of no- 
thing ; this may still be good doctrine for the 
unscientific, but it has been repudiated by all 
students of cosmogony. 

The essential heresy of Marcion, Basilides, 
Valentinus, and all the Gnostics lay in their 
denial of the Unity of God. They were not 
arrayed against the claims of the Trinity, for 
such a doctrine had not been even remotely 
foreshadowed in their days. The eternity of 
matter, the creation of the world by inferior 
powers, and the two-God theory horrified 
Irenaeus as later they did Origen and Tertul- 
lian ; the letter of Irenaeus to his old fellow- 
pupil Florinus, who had embraced the teachings 
of Valentinus, is an effort to, reclaim him to a 
belief in the Unity of God. The opponents 
of Gnosticism felt a greater solicitude because 



96 One World at a Time 



they foresaw that, despite the noble lives of its 
first exponents, there would logically attend 
upon Gnosticism the same degradation which 
had debased both Stoicism and Epicureanism. 
Their opposition was justified by the result as 
shown in the Cainites and other sects, who 
claimed that the best way to resist the assaults 
of evil was to yield to its immoralities as of 
no account to the spirit and unworthy of at- 
tention, being only in the flesh. The gross- 
ness of life which resulted proved that with 
the common people the ethical tendency of 
Gnosticism could be only evil. It is therefore 
an error to suppose that the enthusiasm of 
Irenseus, Origen, Hippolytus, and Tertullian 
was because they were lacking in regard to 
God's Unity. It was the very reverse of this 
which gave power to their assault upon 
Gnosticism. 

Still another class of heretical opposition is 
represented in that vindication of the liberty 
of prophesying which takes the name of Mon- 
tanism. Montanus, Prisca, and Maximilla, the 
founders of a Society of Friends during the 
reign of Marcus Aurelius, were perhaps in- 
cited to a philosophy of salvation, a study of 
the life of the soul, by the example of the 
Stoic Emperor, or goaded to it by the growing 



God is One 



97 



licentiousness of a court over which a philo- 
sopher reigned, but which a profligate woman 
and her son Commodus actually ruled. Le- 
galism was strangely united to liberty in the 
teaching and practice of Montanism. Fast- 
ing and asceticism commended the heresy to 
the fiery soul of Tertullian. He declaimed 
against its frenzied prophesying until he was 
himself in an ecstasy of passion in which he 
passed to adhesion to the sect (a.d. 202) which 
fulminated from Carthage its anathemas 
against the license of Rome. The heretic was 
more orthodox than the Church in behaviour, 
and, with a strange mingling of doctrinal ex- 
actness and personal self-denial, held aloof from 
the communion of Christianity as breeding 
a schism, only to form a sect still narrower, 
which, living through the third century as " Ter- 
tullianists," made prophecy ridiculous and 
asceticism contemptible. 

The church in the West, under Tertullian's 
lead, was governed by a spirit entirely foreign 
to the liberality of Jesus and Paul in life and 
teaching. It did not maintain in any just de- 
gree the feeling of Justin, Clement of Alex- 
andria, and Origen that God had spoken by 
other lips than those of Jews. " There is one 
River of Truth, but many streams fall into it on 



9B One World at a Time 



this side and that," said Clement. Truth is 
one, but its aspects are various : " A drachma 
is one and the same ; but if you give it to 
a ship-captain, it is called a ■ fare,' if to a re- 
venue officer it is called a ' tax,' if to a landlord 
' rent,' if to a schoolmaster a 1 fee,' if to a shop- 
keeper a 'price.' Still in each case it is the 
drachma." Clement's generous attitude was 
like that of Irenaeus, whose mission from the 
churches of Gaul to Victor of Rome pleaded 
for moderation toward Montanism, since it 
held strongly the doctrine of the Word, of the 
Holy Spirit, and the liberty of the soul to know 
the will of God. Clement declared that " the 
cure for error is more knowledge." Such was 
not the attitude of Tertullian and Tatian ; 
these masters of abuse were most orthodox in 
declaring all philosophy " a doctrine of devils." 
Their motto was, " Only believe," a motto en- 
forced by a picturesque blasphemy against 
human error, which left nothing to be supplied 
by a later age in its trials for heresy. 

Tertullian, indeed, speculated upon the 
original righteousness of man, fulfilled in the 
ideal humanity of Christ ; but his fine phrase, 
" Man first, then God," was so twisted by his 
bias against his opponents that he never rises 
to an " enthusiasm of humanity." He was 



God is One 



99 



tenacious of a Trinity, and for this reason he 
crept back into the Roman calendar of saints 
with all his sins of unholy speech and vicious 
temper full upon him ; but his Trinity was 
neither logical according to later standards, 
nor scriptural according to earlier standards. 
He wrote and spoke with unremitting vehe- 
mence. His ''testimony of the soul" makes 
the claim for Christianity that it is grounded 
in the nature of man and meets his deepest 
needs. But he is more interested in things 
against which his own soul may testify, — 
"against the Greeks," "against the Jews," 
"against Hermogenes," who claimed that matter 
was eternal, " against the Gnostic Valentinus," 
" against all heretics," denying them any claim 
to tolerance, " against Marcion," " against 
Praxeas," who seemed to imply that God suf- 
fered in the flesh of Christ and whom he 
taunted with " crucifying the Father." There 
was much, besides, on which Tertullian had an 
opinion : he wrote on baptism, on the flesh of 
Christ, on the resurrection of the body, on 
penance, prayer, and patience. He wrote an 
address to the martyrs ; he unreservedly con- 
demned the shows of the theatre ; he fixed the 
place of idolatry in the calendar of hate. He 
was wise about the dress of women. He gave 
Lof C. 



IOO 



One World at a Time 



final judgment as to veils or no veils for un- 
married women. He opposed second marriage, 
and rather deprecated any marriage at all. 
His asceticism gave weight to fasting; he ar- 
gued the right and wrong of military service ; 
he defended a Christian soldier who refused to 
wear a wreath in one of the festivals of Severus ; 
he discussed the question whether in perse- 
cution one might avoid his doom by flight. 
Thus did he know and say much about many 
things ; for most that he said the Church cares 
but little now, but it turns to his doctrine of 
the Nature of God and declares him a Father of 
the Faith on the only subject upon which he 
could know absolutely nothing. He was a man 
of credulity and yet of spiritual insight ; he 
could say, " We believe, because it is impos- 
sible " ; but he could also say " The soul divines 
what is divine." Such a man, with his barbar- 
ous African Latin and his Latinised Greek, is 
vehement for the Trinity, but it is a trinity of 
his own making ; it is neither that of Sabellius, 
revived in the nineteenth century by Bushnell 
and borrowed by his later imitators, nor that 
of Hegel, who is now the consolation of the 
" Broad Church." Even to Tertullian the 
subordination of Christ leaves God supreme : 
" Christ is God's ray, as the rays shine forth 



God is One 



IOI 



from the sun in the heaven ; as I call the ray 
sun but not the sun ray ; so I call the Son God, 
but not God the Son." He speaks the lan- 
guage of simple religion when he appeals to 
the soul itself as the witness to Christian faith : 
" I summon thee, not such as when, formed in 
the schools, exercised in libraries, nourished in 
the Academies and Porches of Athens, thou 
utterest crude wisdom. I address thee as 
simple and rude, unpolished and unlearned, 
such as they have thee, who have only thee ; 
the very and entire thing that thou art in the 
road and in the weaver's factory." 

The student of the second and third centu- 
ries, following the lead of most modern writers, 
will come upon a group of names classed in a 
loose way as " the first Unitarians." We have 
already claimed as the first Unitarians the Jews, 
to whom Jesus, himself a Jew, spoke of the 
Fatherhood of God ; the first Unitarian re- 
cords are the Scriptures of the Old Testament, 
to the reading of which the chief Church 
Fathers and champions of Christian doctrine 
declare their conversion from paganism was 
due. Such is the testimony of Justin Martyr, 
Origen, and Athenagoras. 

By "the first Unitarians," however, most 
Trinitarian writers mean quite another matter. 



io2 One World at a Time 



They have forgotten the Jewish origins of 
Christianity. They have lost sight of the 
facts that its earliest converts from paganism 
came through Jewish channels, and that from 
the Jew Philo and his compatriots in Alexan- 
dria Neo-Judaism, Neo-Platonism and Christ- 
ianity have all drawn their stock theories for 
the Logos-doctrine, without which it is doubt- 
ful if the Christian Church would have lapsed 
into the Trinitarian belief, or returned to ex- 
press its theology in terms of a pagan myth- 
ology and its faith in the symbols of the 
same mythology, or to be glad with a sacred 
joy as it celebrates the old pagan festivals 
put to new and strange uses. 

With serene oblivion of such facts, certain 
names are pilloried as Unitarians and con- 
demned. They are the group who, without 
perfect logic, but with a certain instinct for 
the facts of early Christianity, sought to re- 
vive the old doctrine of the Unity of God, 
unconfused by the newer doctrine of the 
Logos in its manifold varieties of statement. 
They are defenders of the primitive faith, not 
seceders from the orthodox teaching. Who 
are these men ? Many of them are known 
to us only by name. Some who early saw 
the inconsistency between the history of Jesus 



God is One 



103 



in the fourth Gospel and that given in the 
Synoptics, the contradiction between the intro- 
duction to John's Gospel and the birth stories 
of the Synoptics Matthew and Luke, were 
stigmatised as Alogians, " Deniers of the 
Word." Others made a feeble attempt at 
New Testament criticism and held that we 
have a record of little more than a single year 
of the ministry of Jesus ; still others, with 
quite excusable rationalism, said of the Apoc- 
alypse, " Of what use is it all?" In this 
group must be placed Theodotus of Rome 
and that other Theodotus who came to Rome 
from Bysance ; their disciples we know as 
Asclepiades, Hermophiles, and Apollonides. 

But attention is chiefly riveted by the bril- 
liant career and acute intellectual gymnastic 
of Zenobia's officer, Paul of Samosata, Bishop 
of Antioch, a.d. 260-270. His doctrine was 
much hurt by his vanity ; yet the record of this 
must be not too credulously received. For 
the most part he and all others whom the 
councils of the fourth century condemned 
are known to us, like Celsus, that early scien- 
tific and speculative genius, only from the 
statements of those who have left us the 
condemnation of their heresies. They all 
knew "the gentle art of making enemies"; 



104 One World at a Time 

and the enemies wrote their histories. Paul 
of Samosata may well stand for all the rest. 
His views are thus summed up by Pres- 
sense, a Trinitarian writer : 

"The Bishop of Antioch carried out the principles 
of Theodotus and Artemon (monarchianism) to their 
extreme consequences. He lowered the dignity of 
Christ so far as to liken him to a mere man. Denying 
his pre-existence, he admitted no distinction of persons 
in the Godhead. The Logos was for him simply the 
consciousness which God has of Himself, not a separate 
Person but the simple consciousness of His own person- 
ality. In this sense man is the image of God, but he 
can never attain to essence with the Divine Being, not 
even by Jesus Christ. There was a positive action of 
the Word upon the man Jesus. The Spirit of God 
had descended upon him, but this action was merely 
an influence and did not imply unity of essence. Jesus 
was indeed born of a virgin, but he was none the less 
in his nature a man like other men, with this difference, 
that he realised holiness and thus merited the grace of 
God in extraordinary measure. The Divine Logos ani- 
mated him by inspiration, but was not incarnate in him. 
'Wisdom,' said Paul of Samosata, 'did not enter into 
substantial union with human nature.' Thus the dif- 
ference between Jesus Christ and other men is relative 
only. Wisdom simply dwelt in him in an exceptional 
manner, and it was by the measure of this Divine 
communication alone that he was raised above our- 
selves. How, indeed, can it be maintained that Jesus 
is the Son of God ? Is not that name already given 
to the Eternal Wisdom ? It would follow that there 



God is One 



must be two Sons of God, in the absolute sense, which 
is impossible. Jesus was not, therefore, the Son of 
God when he was born of the virgin, but acquired that 
high dignity by virtue of his holiness. The Word 
was greater than Jesus, but Jesus was exalted by Wis- 
dom. ' There was no other mode of union between 
various natures and various persons except that which 
proceeds from the will, remaining pure from sin. Christ 
enjoyed union with God, and this oneness of the will 
in love is far higher than mere unity of nature. Jesus 
is the ideal man who flashes before our eyes the purest 
rays of Divine wisdom.' " 

With this utterance of the third century 
compare the words of James Martineau, pre- 
eminently the prophet of the Unitarian faith of 
to-day : 

" When it is said, of this personal appearance of divine 
qualities of mind on the theatre and under the con- 
ditions of human life, that the ' Word ' itself was 1 made 
flesh and dwelt among us,' the phrase simply affirms that 
these qualities are not mere earth-born and animal phe- 
nomena, but are really the living word of a heavenly 
sphere, and speak of God. This is no more ' a figure 
of speech ' than the plainest sentence we can frame re- 
specting things transcendent. I know not whether 
others can draw a sharp line of separation between the 
human spirit and the divine, and can clearly say where 
their own soul ends and God's communion begins. 
But for myself, with closest thought, I confess my dark- 
ness ; and can only say that somehow He stirs among 
our higher affections and mingles with the action of our 



io6 



One World at a Time 



proper nature. If in Christ this divine margin was not 
simply broader than elsewhere, but spread until it cov- 
ered the whole soul, and brought the human into moral 
coalescence with the divine, then was God not merely- 
represented by a foreign and resembling being, but per- 
sonally there, giving expression to His spiritual nature, as 
in the visible universe to His causal power." 

This comparison of utterances sixteen hundred 
years apart gives to the Unitarianism of Paul 
of Samosata no mean distinction. 

We find the same insistence upon moral 
union with God in Artemon and in Beryllus, 
Bishop of Bostra. We are inclined to suspect 
there was good foundation for the statement 
of Artemon that this view was the faith of all 
the bishops of Rome to the time of Victor, the 
thirteenth in order, whose successor, Zephyri- 
nus, formulated the Catholic theory, thereby 
corrupting the simplicity of faith. Zephyrinus 
was himself no more orthodox, but inclined to 
the opposite extreme of Patripassianism. This 
claim of Artemon has much to support it in the 
writers of the second century, writers who lie 
under no suspicion of heresy. 

A curious testimony to this early faith as 
Unitarian is to be found in Tertullian, who 
admits that his view is not easily or generally 
apprehended by the believers. His admission 
is singularly convincing. He says : 



God is One 



107 



" The simple (I will not call them unwise and unlearned) 
who always constitute the majority of believers, are 
startled at the oinovojxia (or dispensation of the three 
in one) on the ground that their very rule of faith with- 
draws them from the world's plurality of gods to the one 
only true God ; not understanding that, although He is 
an only God, He must yet be believed in with His own 
oixovopiia. The numerical order and distribution of 
the Trinity they assume to be a division of the Unity ; 
whereas the Unity which draws the Trinity out of its 
own self is so far from being destroyed that it is actually 
supported by it. They are constantly throwing out 
against us that we are preachers of two gods and three 
gods, while they take to themselves pre-eminently the 
credit of being worshippers of the one God." 

Tertullian is referring to the common people 
to whom the Supreme and Eternal One, re- 
vealed in Jesus Christ His Son, was the ground 
of faith, and to whom no definition of God's 
inner Being, no theory of a new God in the 
world, could yet remove the conviction that a 
new sense of God and a new regard for man 
was the contribution Christianity had made to 
the world's happiness. 

With this view we find a striking agreement 
in documents admitted to be the most precious 
relics of the faith of this time. The letter to 
Diognetus holds high rank, as a record of the 
faith of the second century, but there is no 
Trinitarianism in it. The Teaching of the 



io8 One World at a Time 



Twelve belongs to the same century, but the 
" Mighty Maker" and his "servant Jesus" 
sufficiently explain baptism in the name of the 
Father and the Son and the Holy Ghost as 
no declaration of Trinity in Unity. Even the 
celebration of the divinity in Christ which we 
encounter in Justin is not confused by any 
effort to make him the equal of the Father. 
For Justin declares: "We worship and love 
next to God the Logos that is from the unbe- 
gotten and unutterable Deity, since for us he 
became man that he might share our sufferings 
and effect our cure " 

What is called " Origen's Platonic taint " ac- 
cords better with the thought of the third 
century at large than with what is expected 
of it by later controversialists. To Origen 

" God is the One Absolute Being, not supra-cosmic 
only but transcendental, the self-existent and self-suf- 
ficing monad, who alone contemplates Himself in un- 
changing perfection, called in Scripture the Father. 
Even the Logos does not contemplate the Father as the 
Father contemplates Himself. The Son and Spirit are 
not necessary to the Father so far as He is absolute God, 
but only so far as He is Love, Father, Creator." 

Here begins to appear the triumph of Greek 
philosophising over the simplicity of Christian 



God is One 



109 



faith in its devotion to the person of Jesus 
Christ and its defence of his ideals with 
ethical passion. Origen and Tertullian are 
far nearer to the Nicene speculation than 
their contemporary, Minucius Felix, who in 
that gem of dialogue, Octavius, omits all the 
doctrines upon which the others most insist. 
He knows nothing of the Trinity, and hints 
only at the divinity of Christ or of the Holy 
Spirit. It is entertaining to hear the com- 
plaint of those who would use his apology 
for Christianity, that while " none of the apo- 
logies is so elegant, none is so barren of 
distinctive teaching ; ... as a statement 
of the Christian case it is extremely incom- 
plete " ; yet those who have deprived us of 
so much touching the second and third cent- 
uries have carefully preserved this apology 
of the age of Severus (225 a.d.) answering 
the charges made by Caecilius against Christ- 
ianity. We cannot make the writers of the 
third century speak the metaphysics of the post- 
Nicene Church. If we find a gratification 
of later claims in Origen and Tertullian and 
Athanasius, we find the failure of such ex- 
pectation in most of the others. Even these 
champions of the Trinity are inconsistent with 
the orthodoxy of a later time. They repeat- 



I IO 



One World at a Time 



edly refer to the fall of man, which Jesus never 
did, so far as any record shows ; but they did 
not make it the foundation of their system 
of thought as does modern orthodoxy, which 
collapses upon the disappearance of the 
original apostasy from innocence in Eden. 
These strenuous advocates of the Nicene 
tendency did not argue from the total cor- 
ruption of human nature an atonement in any 
of the modern uses of the term ; they did not 
reason from ruin to redemption, but rather 
from the original order and ideal to its realisa- 
tion in Jesus Christ. According to Origen 
the ransom for man is paid to Satan by God. 
" The general characteristics of the theology 
of the second and third centuries are still 
liberty and diversity upon the common ground 
of a living faith in Christ." 

Platonism had made God inaccessible, the 
later Greek thought made God inconceiv- 
able. It remained for Roman Imperialism to 
make God unlovable. So, in a sense the 
Patripassians never dreamed, the Church " sac- 
rificed the Father " in the ardent longing to 
have a God lovable enough to be counted 
human, loving enough to be deemed Divine. 

There can be no proper orthodoxy where 
there is no uniformity in the Church, and that 



God is One 



1 1 1 



no unity in this sense existed is easily shown. 
As late as the second half of the second 
century " catholic " does not mean " orthodox " 
but " universal." It looks to church-extension, 
but does not imply uniformity of thought or 
form. Melito, who seems to recent writers 
the perfection of orthodoxy, was not orthodox 
to Origen or Tertullian. Origen was not 
orthodox to Tertullian, nor was Tertullian 
to the Bishop of Rome. His pupil Cyprian 
defies Roman interference with Carthage ; 
Minucius Felix omits the doctrines upon 
which both Origen and Tertullian insist. The 
Shepherd of Hermas seemed to Irenseus in 
line with scripture, but Tertullian thought 
it a recital of " weak visions " and treated 
it with scorn. This difference was expressed 
by the parties to the contention in language 
neither elegant in form nor Christian in spirit. 

The struggle against heresy was a struggle 
for the unity of God, which was endangered 
by dualism, and for the real humanity of 
Christ, which was endangered by those who 
made his earthly life a mere phantom, " an 
envelope for God." The Fathers were not 
always clear as to their own belief or clear in 
its expression, but they saw what imperilled 
its essential principles ; these, prevailing from 



112 



One World at a Time 



first to last, are the absolute being of God 
and the real human life of Christ. On these 
points the Church maintained its faith and 
united, while dividing everywhere else. 

Uniformity is not more evident if we turn 
to the councils. The synods between the Ni- 
cene Council, a.d. 325, and that at Constantino- 
ple, a.d. 381, were utterly without agreement 
as to what had been done at Nicaea ; the 
council of Ephesus, a.d. 431, repudiated the 
work of Constantinople fifty years earlier and 
forbade the use of any other creed than the 
Nicene, promulgated in a.d. 325. Thus to- 
day that late creed called " Athanasian " is 
under the interdict of the very council which 
determined the Nicene supremacy, and the 
church which recites both in one service 
recites creeds which mutually exclude each 
other. 

The statement of Dr. Martineau, " To see 
the process of the formation of a doctrine is 
already to behold its dissolution," comes con- 
stantly before the mind in such a survey as 
this. When you have the Egyptian triad, 
you have the easy illustration of what is soon 
to be the Christian Trinity. When you read 
the doom of Osiris and how his merits are 
claimed for the Osirians, you already have the 



God is One 



113 



germ of the vicarious atonement. The strug- 
gle between the pictorial triad (Egyptian) and 
the philosophical trinity (Greek) is, from the 
latter part of the third century, the problem 
to be solved by speculative minds in the Christ- 
ian Church. In its lowest form the result is 
mere tritheism, and so expresses itself in Art. 
In its subtler form it is mere metaphysics, and 
separates itself from the human soul in the 
very effort at definition and symbolism. Unity 
loses its ethical value ; its service to the intel- 
lect also declines, and that confusion ensues in 
spite of which Christian thought has been crys- 
talline in its moments of devotion, while turbid 
in its efforts at theological uniformity. The 
centre of gravity was shifted, and men declared 
that intellectual accuracy is orthodoxy, while a 
holy life, without orthodoxy, is " the devil's 
way of serving poison in a clean cup." As in 
Egyptian, so in Christian thought : 

" All that was needed was one more effort of abstrac- 
tion, to put above and behind the triad the Being in 
whom it was resumed and into whom, so to speak, it 
melted ; that higher Unity was sometimes found in the 
First Person of the triad, regarded as reproducing itself 
by eternal generation ; sometimes in a ' Spirit more 
spiritual than the gods'; the holy soul which clothes 
itself with forms, but itself remains unkonwn.', — G. 
d'Alviella, Hibbert Lectures, 1891. 



ii 4 



One World at a Time 



In the period we are surveying, there ap- 
pears a singular event. Rome is no longer 
the imperial centre, except for the Church. 
Constantinople grasps the sceptre and holds 
the throne. The world is Christian, but in a 
sense Jesus never knew and his apostles never 
intended. Alaric is Christian — and a bar- 
barian. Honorius is a Christian theologian — 
and a craven soul. Soon there will be no 
empire but that of the Pope, an empire he 
disputes with the Eastern kings of Constanti- 
nople, — a Christian empire in which Christ 
would have found a speedier crucifixion. It is 
the age of the great apostasy ! An apostasy 
which boasted its orthodoxy and proved it 
upon the bodies of all who differed with its 
exponents. An apostasy beyond doubt, in 
that the unity of God had been lost to philo- 
sophic thought, and the Fatherhood of God 
sounded strange to hearts foreign to all com- 
passion. The Brotherhood of Man had been 
swallowed up by the unclean doctrine of total 
depravity. The sublime doctrine of the Holy 
Spirit as the purifier of the heart had sunk 
into the theory of the dispensation of the 
Holy Ghost as a prerogative of the Church. 
The religion of the Man of Nazareth had been 
transformed into conflicting theories about his 



God is One 



115 



person, for which councils contended with 
blows and scandalous uproar. 

The simple religion which had transfigured 
the life of Israel's last great prophet, and from 
that pure heart of boundless benevolence had 
gone out to bless the world, — this stream of 
pure affection, sprung at once from the remote 
past and flowing afresh from the crystal fount 
of a sublime life, had now sunk as a desert 
stream in the sand. The stream was lost for 
ages underground, reappearing at intervals as 
a spring to flow for a little way, but lost again 
and again in subtilties of speculation or im- 
purities of life, or used only to move the ma- 
chinery of Christian institutions. 

Secular history calls the ages beginning with 
the sixth century " dark." But the history of 
the Church closes its short day before the 
light declines upon the imperial countenance 
of Constantine ; when his politic edict is ut- 
tered the Church has confessed that endorse- 
ment by a murderer can give it peace. The 
scenes of the arena show no longer the calm 
courage of martyrs upon the one side and the 
fierce hunger of the wild beasts upon the other. 
The conflict is transferred to the councils 
where the antagonists all make the sign of 
the cross but shout opposing battle-cries of 



n6 One World at a Time 

doctrinal contention ; where surely " the wrath 
of man worketh not the righteousness of 
God." Holiness of life is as nothing ; but 
lips false in all other things speak the shib- 
boleth without stammering. The Church has 
decreed what shall be the rule of faith since 
it has forsaken what was the rule of faith. 
Solemn processions march to the sanctuaries 
singing the doctrines in Greek doggerel ; 
one party led by a gaunt Arian, the other by a 
fat eunuch of the Empress, meet in the streets 
of Alexandria and stone each other, while 
cries of " homoiousian " and " homoousian " 
proclaim that " they slay each other for an iota" 
The Athanasian doctrine is at the flood, 
but it will find its ebb within this fourth cent- 
ury. While the Arian emperors re-establish 
the mongrel doctrines of Arianism, there ap- 
pears upon the sky the afterglow of Pagan- 
ism which Julian vainly calls a new dawn, not 
knowing that the sun of Paganism is set. At 
the centres of power, Arianism again declines, 
but its missionaries are carrying a conviction 
that they teach "the truth of the Old Christ- 
ians " to the hearts of the Goths. In the 
far-off forests of central Europe the work of 
Ulfilas shall last when the decrees of the Arian 
emperors have been revoked at Rome. 



God is One 



117 



The century closes ; as the torn scroll of its 
achievement is rolled together we read that 
the Empire is divided between East and West ; 
the great schools of theology are forging the 
arms for new contentions. Upon the vacant 
throne of Roman Imperialism in the West sits 
the Bishop of Rome. The world is Christian 
according to its own confession, and Pagan 
according to every test which the life of Jesus 
and his great words about God's love can 
supply. Two sounds accompany the opening 
decade of the new century. Alaric strikes 
with his sword-hilt upon the gates of Rome 
and demands the surrender of the Imperial 
City to the barbarian. Safe behind the 
marshes of Ravenna, the Emperor Honorius 
clucks to his chickens in their golden cages. 
The Church has gained a creed and lost an 
Empire. Its monotheism has been swamped 
by its explanations about God. The reality 
of God is obscured by its definitions. Ortho- 
doxy is established among the ruins of a 
divided Church. The perdition which had 
been declared to be the punishment of sin has 
now become the penalty of a mistake. The 
only heresy which has nothing to recommend 
it is now universal, — the heresy which declares 
that intellectual accuracy is the condition of 



n8 



One World at a Time 



salvation, and a formula of belief the guarantee 
of religion. 

The unity of faith perished in a struggle for 
uniformity of statement. Henceforward the 
simplicity of religion in its earliest Unitarian 
thought is to be obscured and complicated by 
contentions as to what is the true opinion. 
The critic takes the place of the believer — 
and for fifteen centuries " the battle of the 
Churches " is waged. 



CHAPTER V 
WHY DO CHRISTIANS DIFFER? 

THE battle of the churches is over. If 
not in complete peace, we are at least, in 
a condition of unarmed neutrality. There is a 
uniform and widespread armistice proclaimed. 
There is no confusion, except in the minds of a 
few, concerning the vital questions of religion ; 
indeed, some of us sometimes fear that there 
is inertia, stagnation, in the place of whole- 
some agitation. And yet, we are not of the 
number who seek to project a conflict. 
Rather let the pools of thought cleanse them- 
selves by the freshets of contemporary opinion 
flowing into them. Let not any devout soul 
stir them, lest, if there be stagnation, their 
miasma get abroad, and lest they simply set- 
tle down to their own sediment again. Rather 
let the new streams of contemporary thought 
flush them out, while we watch to see the 
progress of the human mind. 

I call attention now to certain reasons 
ng 



i2o One World at a Time 



for the critical attitude prevailing in spite of 
these conditions that I have named. How is 
it that the faith held by a great number in the 
world of modern thought becomes a subject of 
dispute and criticism in other minds? How 
does criticism of Unitarianism arise ? 

First, then, because of a misplaced emphasis 
in those critical minds. What a sentence 
means depends largely upon its emphasis, and 
what a mind means depends largely upon its 
emphasis ; and when the emphasis is laid in 
the wrong place, however actively the mind 
may express itself, it expresses itself to small 
purpose. It is difficult for two minds, differ- 
ently emphasising what they consider import- 
ant, to get together, to see alike, to say the 
same thing, to be in unison ; and much of the 
criticism to which I shall refer in the follow- 
ing pages is due to a misplaced emphasis in 
religion. 

For instance, it is never said that people 
of our way of thinking are immoral. On the 
contrary, we are accused of having " mere 
morality." What "mere morality" maybe, in 
a universe so closely knit together in its parts 
as this in which we live, I fail to understand. 
How morality can be other than the guarantee 
of religion, it is difficult to determine. But we 



Why do Christians Differ? 121 



are never called immoral. It would be a vain 
attack which should take that form. For, 
however the saintliness in those who are saintly 
may be accused of being only "good form," 
it is good form still ; and I suspect it is 
good form in the Kingdom of Heaven. So 
the emphasis is not laid upon life at all. The 
objection is not made that we do not live 
well, that we do not behave well, that we do 
not deport ourselves consonantly with the in- 
terests of society. We are not accused of 
being law-breakers or offenders against any 
code of good behaviour. On the contrary, we 
are said to be quite complacent and well- 
behaved people ; we are accused of being too 
serene and undisturbed. That is not true ; 
and to the answer of that criticism I shall 
come later on. The emphasis of the critic is 
misplaced ; it is laid upon doctrine and not 
upon life. If the emphasis were laid on life, 
then the exactness of our deportment, the 
rectitude of our behaviour, the integrity of our 
method, the whole moral tenor of our life 
would receive the emphasis ; for, after all, the 
business of life is living, and Matthew Arnold 
was inside the truth when he said : " conduct 
is three-fourths of life." I should say it is the 
other fourth also, and that conduct is all there 



122 



One World at a Time 



is of life. Whatever may inspire the conduct, 
whatever may grace the conduct, whatever may 
adorn the conduct or may result from the con- 
duct, still, after all, I am conducting my life on 
a given principle. 

Now, the emphasis, if laid on doctrine, 
misses altogether what life means. What is 
doctrine ? It is a more or less accurate defini- 
tion of how one man interprets religion to 
another man. If men were isolate and alone, 
separate, secluded, each man might be able to 
conduct his religious life on terms of the 
highest rectitude, without the necessity for 
definition. But the moment another man ap- 
pears and says, " Why do you worship, and 
whom ? What do you believe, and why ? 
What are the motives of action, and how did 
you come by them ? W T hat is the experience 
of life in its highest terms ? " immediately there 
must be definition. In other words, I must 
define or delimit, draw a line round and make 
a demarcation of the whole plat of my think- 
ing. I must map out my mind to the man 
who inquires, so that he will know where to 
find me on this or that aspect of life. That 
is definition. But when a man comes and 
says, " Now you have not the right definition," 
it is like saying to a cook who is preparing a 



Why do Christians Differ? 123 



repast, which is, by the proof of her experi- 
ence, likely to be a very delicious repast, 
" But you have not the right recipe." She 
points to the viands, and says, " Why ? They 
are edible, delicious, approved by the house- 
hold." So somebody who thinks definition is 
the thing, — that the recipe is the food, that the 
prescription is the medicine, — arraigns another 
man on the ground that he has not the right 
definition. It is exactly like one who has 
found a new star by the telescope in the ob- 
servatory being accused by another astron- 
omer, who has been working on the matter 
mathematically to see where the star ought to 
be in the sidereal universe, that he has not 
shown the formula by which the calculation 
was made, by which the star was discovered. 
He says to him, " You cannot give the defini- 
tion ; you cannot state the formula." The 
other man turns to him and says, "There is 
the star ! " So the emphasis is laid on the 
wrong thing when laid upon accuracy of state- 
ment, upon definition, upon opinion. These 
all change, and human life, with a certainty 
that is simply sublime, goes on calmly ripen- 
ing its experiences, developing its powers, 
and assuring itself by converse with reality. 
The emphasis is misplaced not only in the 



124 



One World at a Time 



fact that doctrine is put instead of life, but 
also because the objector is often not con- 
cerned about the right thing. If you are con- 
cerned about the saving of your soul, as the 
major part of the Christian Church used to 
be concerned, then the emphasis is misplaced, 
for you cannot save your soul. If you are 
ever saved, your soul will do it. You could 
just as well talk about a man, saving his seed- 
wheat by keeping it in his barn. He saved 
it ; and his field has grown up to grass. He 
has not any harvest, but he has saved his 
seed-wheat. Another man does not save it 
at all, but flings it into the ground, which he 
has ploughed and harrowed, prepared and 
mellowed, until it is ready for just that kind 
of thing that seed-wheat is. He flings it 
away and says, 14 I don't want to save it " ; 
but the next autumn the abundant harvest 
of his rich acres will show that his seed-wheat 
saved him. It is just so with the soul. You 
cannot 44 save your soul" without ''losing it." 
If you are ever saved your soul will be the 
saving power ; and it will not be saved, in 
my judgment, unless it is worth it. So that, 
if the emphasis is laid upon salvation, in the 
sense of taking care of your immortal soul, 
the result, when it is not ludicrous, is tragic ; 



Why do Christians Differ? 125 



and the objector who comes and says, " You 
don't try to save your soul," is quite right. 
We do not. That is not our business. God 
put into man the breath of life, and said to 
him, " Save your kind." So the emphasis of 
the objector is laid in the wrong place, be- 
cause it is laid on the wrong thing. He is 
not concerned about the right object of life, 
which is not saving one's self, but saving the 
other man. Swim ashore, let the other man 
drown ! stand dripping, and see him go down ! 
That is the attitude of a man who wants to 
save his soul. The business of life is to get 
a grip on something that is not strong enough 
to strike out for itself. The whole business 
of life is to make the world better. I think 
that God did not make it very well in the 
beginning, simply to give us a task ; just as, 
in the old legend, He brought the creatures 
before the first man, it is said, " to see what 
he would call them." That is a touch of 
comedy in the ancient story. He made them 
pass before Adam " to see what he would call 
them," and when he had given them all names, 
God said to him, " This garden is for you 
to cultivate. Let yourselves be fruitful and 
multiply and replenish the earth. Cultivate 
and dress the garden." And ever since the 



i26 One World at a Time 



first work-day in the world, the business of 
life has been to carry on what God started, 
but did not make complete. We are there- 
fore "workers together with God" ; and when 
we are objected to on the ground that we are 
not saving our souls, we answer : 11 From the 
time of Channing in the century that has just 
passed, until now, the emphasis has been upon 
public life among us. From the days of 
Tuckerman in the last century, until now, the 
emphasis has been upon scientific, organised, 
capable work with our fellows in what is now 
known as organised charity ; and in our own 
theological schools, so much is this emphasis 
understood that in each of them there is a 
chair of Sociology, on the ground that a 
minister who knows theology and does not 
know sociology is only a half-equipped man." 
Indeed, I think all theology might be left 
one side, provided we knew about folk and 
worked upon our fellows for the bettering 
of the world. The business of religion is to 
add zest to life, to make it so well worth liv- 
ing, in the religious man's estimation, that he 
shall hunger in heart to make it more worth 
while to the other man. So this misplaced 
emphasis is the first reason for the arising of 
criticism. 



Why do Christians Differ? 127 



The second reason for its appearance is 
ignorance. One body of Christians criticises 
another, largely because of the lack of exact 
knowledge. Now, ignorance is a very relative 
term. A banker would be perfectly justified 
in saying to the clergyman : " Your specialty is 
not banking ; therefore I hold you to be, from 
my standpoint, ignorant." But the clergyman 
might retort, " Your business is not knowing 
the philosophy of religion, the history of the- 
ology. You are not dealing continually with 
the souls of men at first hand, in that per- 
petual confession that comes into a minister's 
life ; therefore, so far as my vocation is con- 
cerned, I hold you to be an ignorant man." 
And so it would run all the way through. 
The musician says to the man who sings four 
different tunes to the four lines of a hymn, 
" You are ignorant of music." He is quite 
right. The only trouble with the man is that 
he is not dumb as well, so that he attempt not 
the impossible. The artist says to the people 
in the inartistic walks of life who cannot under- 
stand a black-and-white drawing, who cannot 
see anything in it, but must have something 
that is in sharp contrasts of color, " You have 
not an artistic appreciation." He is quite 
right. Ignorance is a movable term. So I 



128 



One World at a Time 



say of people who offer criticism of us, they 
are ignorant about the thing of which they are 
talking. Let me tell you what they ought 
to know in order to be competent to offer 
opinions of a critical kind on the Unitarian 
faith. 

They ought to know the struggle of soul 
which comes to one who wants to find God 
for himself. They may have that ; they must 
have that in order to offer an opinion about 
anybody's religion. Then they should know 
the first three centuries of Christianity better 
than the last three centuries of human history, 
or as well, if they are particularly apt as histor- 
ical students. In the next place, they should be 
experts in Biblical criticism, both of the Old and 
the New Testaments, and have a large general 
knowledge of universal religion. They should 
be more or less familiar with the great ethnic 
faiths ; should know the Dhammapada ap- 
proximately as well as the Sermon on the 
Mount ; should know the Bhavagadghita ap- 
proximately as well as the Gospels of the New 
Testament ; should know the Vedic Hymns 
as well as the hymns of the Christian Church. 
When they are dealing in criticism of people 
who claim to go back to universal religion, to 
deal with things at first hand, who do not care 



Why do Christians Differ? 129 



for sacerdotalism of any kind or institutional 
life as affecting the Church, then they must 
know these things and many others. And if 
they do not know these, and, nevertheless, of- 
fer their criticism, they are simply skimming 
the surface of their minds. It is very im- 
promptu, — very much like an improvisation of 
criticism about an historic fact. 

Ignorance may be of another kind, — ignor- 
ance of the motive-power of the religion criti- 
cised. There is a vast deal of that. For 
instance, take the administration of the United 
States, for illustration, — to venture upon deli- 
cate ground. If I am a critic of the administra- 
tion of my country, I should not only have, as 
in the other matter just referred to, as much 
knowledge of the facts as the administration 
has, so that, if I were given the opportunity, I 
could step into the Cabinet and bear my share 
of the responsibility, take the portfolio of the 
Secretary of the Navy or of the Treasury, and 
bear my part in the place of the absentee whose 
place I have taken, — I must not only know all 
these facts, but I must understand, in addition 
to them, the motive and genius and method of 
the administration in a given period. I must 
know what it never has told to any man. I 
must know what it hopes to achieve in the 



130 



One World at a Time 



end, which does not yet appear as a matter of 
history. That is the reason some of us feel 
impatience with critics of great national ques- 
tions, — that they have no trust except in the 
edge of their own scalpel, and they dissect and 
dismember and criticise without knowledge, 
because they are ignorant, first, of the facts 
which to-morrow's paper may contradict, as 
they apprehend them ; and, second, of the mot- 
ive and genius of administration, which lies 
behind the things that are being done. So in 
religious movements ; for religion has a mot- 
ive-power ; it is directed toward a definite 
end ; it seeks to achieve by a given method a 
given result. Just as in Rome you say the 
motive was power ; in Greece you say the mo- 
tive was art ; in the Orient the motive was 
meditation, and in the Occident the motive 
is enterprise ; so in every division of the hu- 
man family you discover the motive, and then 
have the key to unlock the secrets of its his- 
tory. So, in every religious movement there 
is a conviction that characterises it, a method 
of thinking that belongs to it. I think Ed- 
ward Everett Hale is not far wrong when he 
says that the establishment of an Unitarian 
Church in a town means increased facilities 
in the sanitation of that neighbourhood. It 



Why do Christians Differ? 131 



means also a tightening up of the whole of 
life's obligations ; it means a simplifying of the 
terms of religion. 

Still another reason for criticism among 
Christians is the dependence upon authority. 
Usually the critic is somebody v/ho is quoting 
somebody else. He is " a scribe and a Phar- 
isee " in that sense. They marvelled at the 
teaching of Jesus, because he spoke " as one 
having authority, and not as their scribes," 
who always quoted something somebody else 
said. So the critic is quoting his criticism. 
Students of literature know how true that 
is. You sometimes stumble upon a man 
who " knows everything there is in Shake- 
speare." I came upon such a man the other 
day, and he commenced to recite Shake- 
speare to me ; but as he made two or three 
radical blunders, not in reading, but in the 
meaning of the text, I did not remain. I 
could not afford the time. He was a simple 
Shakespeare parrot, without its colours and 
its excuse for being. So those who are study- 
ing literary criticism, as every man in the min- 
istry must, know perfectly well that for the 
most part the critics are retailing some ancient 
opinion about the thing in hand, and when 
you get a man who deals with the matter at 



132 One World at a Time 

first hand you receive a kind of shock. The 
conclusions of such a critic may not be exact ; 
but he is dealing with things at first hand. 

So the critic of a religious kind is often 
simply a quoting person, who says, " Dr. So- 
and-so said," or, " The commentator of such a 
period has said," or, " This or that Church 
holds concerning you." Send him away until 
he can come with something which is his own. 
A friend of mine heard a distinguished Eng- 
lish preacher in a cathedral in the Orient, 
and she came away saying, " The Canon said 
1 this is the received doctrine of the Church,' 
' the Church has always held,' ' It is corn- 
commonly believed amongst us,' but he 
says nothing of what he himself believes." 
Then the distinguished preacher was ac- 
costed by his friend who heard this state- 
ment and repeated it to him, saying, " My 
daughter says you said nothing out of your 
mind this morning, but said, ' The common 
opinion is,' 1 The Church has always held,' " 
his answer was, " How very acute ! Few 
persons would have observed it ! " That is 
trifling. That just escapes being wicked by 
being inane. A man with the serious business 
of life on hand covers his statement with quot- 
ation marks, as though he knew nothing of 



Why do Christians Differ? 133 



his own mind ! That is the usual attitude 
of the critic of another man's religion. He is 
retailing at a lower price something that he 
has found, and therefore can afford to sell it 
below the market value. It was not a discov- 
ery on his part. He did not make it. He 
did not dig it out. He simply picked it up. 
It was not his. He then passed it along with 
just a little acid added. Now, if there is any- 
thing more useless than that, I do not happen 
to remember at this moment what it is. 

Finally, criticism of one form of faith by 
another often has its root in denominational 
pride. I can understand anybody's being 
proud of what has been achieved. We 
ride with Paul Revere because he dared, and 
stand with " the embattled farmers " at Lex- 
ington because they dared. We review the 
great periods of our national history because 
it is something done, something achieved. We 
take up the autobiography of Booker Washing- 
ton, Up from Slavery, and follow the boy from 
his almost unknown beginning until he becomes 
the most useful man of his race in America, 
because it is something done, something ac- 
complished. But why should anybody get 
excited about a table of statistics ? Shown by 
the census, the cost of church building in this 



i34 One World at a Time 



country, proportionate to the number engaged, 
falls first on the Jew, and then on the Unitarian. 
But it was a mere matter of fact ; not a sub- 
ject for boasting. Or when great annual meet- 
ings are held by denominations, to recite their 
achievements of increasing membership, of 
churches built, of enriched liturgy, of what- 
ever it may be, it is a thing to be allowed by a 
sane mind, but it cannot be very interesting to 
anybody that has anything to do. I am re- 
minded of the dialogue between Emerson and 
Lowell on top of the tower of Notre Dame in 
Paris. Emerson was talking about Alcott, and 
he said to Lowell, " I asked Alcott what he 
had ever done. He said he had written so and 
so, he had thought this and that. ' But,' I said, 
4 What have you ever done f ' And then," said 
Emerson, " the Brahmin turned to me and said, 
' If Pythagoras should come to Concord, whom 
would he ask to see ? ' " There you have it. 
You say that is colossal self-conceit. Well, it 
is the same thing as denominational pride. It 
is the "counting of the hosts of the Lord." 
It is as the old story in that charming legend 
of Gideon, who, when he found there were ten 
thousand who were ready to take sword against 
the enemies of Jehovah, had impressed upon 
him by the Divine command that there were 



Why do Christians Differ? 135 



too many, and so he led them down to the 
stream, and nine thousand seven hundred flung 
themselves down upon their faces and swilled 
the water out of the stream as a preparation 
for battle, and three hundred lapped it out 
of their hands, drinking as a dog drinks; and 
these three hundred were chosen. The feel- 
ing comes upon the human mind that not 
numbers, nor institutions, nor popularity, nor 
fashionable adherents, nor anything else 
counts, but simply ability to swing the weapon 
and cut your way through ; and denominational 
pride has much to do with the criticism which 
says, " Why, you are one of the smallest de- 
nominations on the face of the earth." We 
had not denied that fact ; and sometimes that 
church that rates us as small, is itself only sixth 
in the order of denominations of the country 
at large, but swells in numbers where religion 
is made easy and popular and fashionable. 

So when we examine the criticisms that 
we are to analyse in these succeeding chap- 
ters, we have to bear in mind that they arise 
either from misplaced emphasis, or from the 
domination of fear, or from denominational 
pride, or from some merely meretricious and 
external thing, and that therefore, whilst they 
do not hurt us, they ought to be considered 



136 



One World at a Time 



for the benefit of those, most of all, who, 
being almost as uninformed as the critic, 
are more easily affected by the criticism 
itself. 



CHAPTER VI 



WHAT IS IT TO BELIEVE IN CHRIST? 

f APPROACH the subject with some diffid- 
' ence, not because I am not sure of what 
Unitarians believe respecting Jesus of Naza- 
reth, but because it is so easy, when one is 
touched to the quick by such a criticism as 
this, to put into the answer a little more feel- 
ing than a judicial attitude of mind would war- 
rant. For this is about the only thing that is 
said against us that we care for. We do care 
when people say that we do not believe in 
Christ, and for various reasons. 

In the first place, we are sorry that people 
should make such a mistake, because the mis- 
take hurts them. It cannot hurt us except in 
one way, and that is, it keeps reverent people 
from coming to us who have nowhere else to 
go. There are many people who have fallen 
out of line with much of the received doctrine 
of the churches called Evangelical, who are 
hindered from allying themselves with the 

137 



138 



One World at a Time 



Unitarian method of life and faith, because 
they believe when it is said that Unitarians do 
not believe in Christ that something true has 
been said. And we lament this ; although 
we are not given to proselyting and do not 
care to make many disciples for disciples-sake ; 
we feel with Emerson when he was reproached 
with having no disciples at the end of twenty- 
five years of teaching, and said, " What 
should I do with them if they came to 
me ? I should have to send them back to 
themselves." So discipleship for discipleship's 
sake does not appeal to us. But, in spite of 
this, we have a hospitable faith. We do de- 
sire to receive among ourselves those whom 
we may help ; and when reverent people, who 
are the only people we care about having 
come, are kept away by the false statement 
that we do not believe in Christ, we mourn 
for their sakes that about the only place where 
they could have a reverent attitude toward 
Christ, having given up the other forms of 
faith, has been shut to them by this aspersion 
which is not true. 

There is another reason why this criticism 
touches us. It gives us a feeling of hopeless- 
ness about the religious education of the world. 
When a thing so simple is so completely 



What is it to Believe in Christ? 139 



misunderstood, it makes one feel that no- 
thing can be explained ; and that if such a 
mistake, with so small an occasion, with such 
an abandonment of all proper inquiry, can be 
made, almost any mistake might be made that 
hinders the religious education of the world. 

So much for the subject, which I approach 
with diffidence, as I say, because I shall try not 
to put into it that deep feeling with respect to 
the criticism which we all feel when it is made, 
for reasons a part of which I have given. 

We come immediately to the inquiry, What 
would it be not to believe in Christ ? There 
are only three ways in which it is possible 
for a human soul not to believe in Christ. 

The first is to believe that he never existed ; 
and a very large school — the Tubingen school 
of criticism, led by Strauss and Baur — for a 
whole generation maintained " the mythical 
theory " with regard to the gospel narratives of 
the life of Christ. It only needed fresh insight 
into history, and new study of the gospels 
to dismiss that " mythical" theory. It is not 
held by any German scholar to-day, so far as I 
know. I believe there is one man in the Uni- 
versity of Berlin who holds it with a kind of at- 
tenuated adherence, and claims the " mythical " 
theory of the life of Christ ; but of this I 



14° One World at a Time 



am not quite sure. But the school of Strauss 
and Baur, however useful they may have been, 
— Strauss being made familiar to readers of 
English through the translation of his Life of 
Jesus by George Eliot, — was only for a time. 
It was an evanescent protest against the his- 
torical Jesus. There are a few unthinking 
people — people who do not read, nor study, 
nor think things down to the ground — who be- 
lieve that Jesus never existed. They might be 
said not to believe in Christ ; and the remedy 
for them would be to put into their hands 
the argument of an English Ecclesiastic, 
who applied the same theory and system of 
reasoning to Napoleon Bonaparte and proved 
that he never existed. That is the easy 
answer to those people, whose theory is based 
in sophistry and lapse of logic, the assumption 
of premises that are not premises, and then 
the application to them of a logical process, 
which may be accurate enough when the false 
premise is admitted. So that if it were true 
of Unitarians that they did not believe that 
Jesus ever lived, they might be said not to be- 
lieve in Christ. But, on the contrary, if there 
is one body of people, one set of scholars, who 
have rescued the historical Jesus from the en- 
wrapping, disfiguring disguises of theology, it 



What is it to Believe in Christ? 141 



is the people of our faith. We have re-estab- 
lished as a historical verity the life and method 
of life of Jesus Christ ; so in that sense it can- 
not be said that we do not believe in Christ. 

There is a second way in which it might be 
true that one did not believe in Christ. It 
might be said that one did not believe in 
Christ who agreed that he did exist, but that 
he was not such a character as he was repre- 
sented to be. That is, that the stories of the 
Gospels and the other writings of the New 
Testament gave a roseate hue to a life that 
was not really as it was represented. That 
would mean that the writers out of their own 
consciousness had evolved a character for 
which no actuality existed, no possible author- 
ity could be given. They would be exactly 
in the situation of the man who " evolved the 
camel out of his own consciousness." It was 
a creature unknown to zoology, absolutely 
unrepresented in any museum or menagerie ; 
but he evolved the camel out of his own con- 
sciousness — he had a camel-consciousness. So 
that if one were to say that Christ did exist, 
but was not the character he was represented 
to be, such a person might be said not to be- 
lieve in Christ. On the contrary, we have 
taken pains to find out what his character was ; 



142 One World at a Time 

we have discriminated between the documents ; 
we have separated them by the keen edge of 
critical discernment, saying that such and such 
things could not possibly be true of him, be- 
cause they are inconsistent with the consensus 
of what his character was. We have put away 
from him those things which tradition had at- 
tached to him as a reproach. For this reason 
the Church set aside all the Apocryphal gos- 
pels, not because there was nothing good in 
them, but because the consensus of them was 
untrue to the Gospels of the New Testament 
which gave us the character of Jesus. So in 
that sense it cannot be said that Unitarians do 
not believe in Christ. 

The third way, and only other way I can 
conceive of in which one may not believe in 
Christ, is, though he admit that Christ did 
exist and was just the character described in 
the Gospels, that he deliberately say, " That is 
not the kind of character that I desire ; that 
is not the sort of leader I will have ; that is not 
the Saviour I want ; he is nothing to me ! His 
open-handed generosity taught the trustee- 
ship of all good gifts from God ; I prefer to 
grab everything in sight and keep it for my 
own. Instead of being the disburser of Gods 
mercies, I prefer to be the grave of God's 



What is it to Believe in Christ? 143 



mercies. If he says, ' Blessed are the peace- 
makers,' I prefer war. I believe the sword is 
the arbiter of human destiny ; not reason nor 
the spirit of love." So such a mind might run 
through all those splendid utterances which 
constitute the law of human life, and say, " I 
will have none of it. His character does not 
please me. His leadership shall not lead me. 
I will go my own way in spite of him, although 
he lived and was such a character as he is 
represented to be." That man would em- 
phatically be chargeable with not believing in 
Christ. 

These are the three ways in which one may 
not believe in Christ. First, that he did not 
exist ; second, if he existed, he was not the 
person described, third, if he existed and was 
the person described, he was not the kind of 
person to love and follow. 

Now, having dismissed those three as utterly 
inapplicable to our state of mind, I ask you, 
What is it to believe in him ? 

The first business of the believer is to know 
what he believes. A general, vague suscept- 
ibility to anything that comes our way is not 
faith. That is credulity. That is what hap- 
pens in a street when the rain flushes it with 
water and the sewers are open. Everything 



i44 One World at a Time 



runs whither gravitation tends, into any open- 
ing that appears. That is the attitude of 
simple credulity ; it is not the attitude of faith. 
No utterly credulous person can be a believer. 
A real believer must have as one of the ele- 
ments of his belief the element of scepticism. 
That is, he must be an inquirer. He must 
understand the difference between this and 
that. He must carefully discriminate in terms 
that make him sure ; so that, when he has 
weeded his garden, he shall enjoy the flowers ; 
when he has picked off the defective fruit, the 
fruit that is forming shall have strength to 
grow ; so that when he has cleaned up his 
mind, the things he holds to, he holds to tena- 
ciously, and with a grasp that nothing can 
loosen. The first condition of believing in any- 
thing is to be sure of it. For that reason we 
claim that we pre-eminently believe in Christ, 
because we try to realise what he was. The 
very first thing to that end is to acquaint one's 
self with the documents that tell about his life. 
No man has any standing in any case who 
argues it out of his prejudices. No man has 
any right to expect a hearing upon any subject 
who does not know the elements which go to 
make it up. In law, he has no standing in 
court ; in philosophy, he has no standing in 

IO 



What is it to Believe in Christ? 145 

learning ; in literature, he is a mere pot-boiler, 
as we say of the man who writes for what he 
can get, without any reference to the facts of 
the case ; — he will write a historical novel in 
which if the characters came to life they 
would be utterly lost in the situations por- 
trayed. So with all the other conditions of 
learning. We must examine the facts. We 
must get at the basis. We must reason the 
thing down to the ground. We must go back 
to " the law and the testimony," as the old 
phrase is ; and, examining the Gospels, and the 
Epistles of Paul, and the other related docu- 
ments of the New Testament, and the writings 
of the earliest Fathers of the Church, we try to 
set Jesus of Nazareth against his own back- 
ground, to put him in his own belongings ; to 
make him not a Greek philosopher, when he 
was a Jew and a peasant and a carpenter ; to 
make him not a nineteenth-century man when 
he belonged to the first century ; to make him 
the thing he was by getting at what we call 
" local colour " and the atmosphere of his human 
life. That is the first condition, and the man 
who attempts anything else, or neglects this 
and then delivers himself authoritatively with 
regard to the life of Jesus of Nazareth, has no 
standing with students. He is talking out of 



146 



One World at a Time 



his prejudices. He is skimming the top of his 
mind. He is merely putting his feelings into 
words. He illustrates what Froude says, that 
" Reason is no match for superstition, and one 
great emotion must be expelled by another." 
So the only help for such a man is to have the 
flood-tide of some great emotion visit him, 
and then he may perhaps be driven back to 
find what Jesus really was in the records of the 
Gospels and the history of the early Church. 
No man can realise what Jesus really was un- 
less he discriminate between the historical 
Jesus and the theological Christ. The atti- 
tude of Jesus himself toward the Messiahship 
seems to have changed during his ministry. 
The records of the early part of his ministry 
do not seem to apply to the latter part of it. 
There is a growing revelation of what Jesus 
thought himself to be, which we must deal 
with most carefully, with discrimination and 
most studious attention, most loving and affec- 
tionate reverence. The man who does not 
do that simply cannot be reckoned with, — 
that is all. So the first business of believ- 
ing in Jesus is to learn who he was. This 
brings us at once into collision with very sin- 
cere people who do not think as we do. In 
the first place, we are in collision with the 



What is it to Believe in Christ? 147 



people who worship the theological Christ, 
but who will admit, when questioned, that if 
they had been present when Jesus of Naza- 
reth was on the earth, and had attempted to 
say their prayers to him, with his Jewish par- 
entage and Jewish training, and his abandon 
to the unity of God as expressed in the great 
Shema which he uttered every day of his life, 
they would have been lifted from their knees, 
while a look of horror would have passed over 
his face to think they should have worshipped 
him. He would have said to them as he said 
to the young man who came to him, " Why 
callest thou me good ? There is none good 
save one, that is God." So this adherence to the 
theological Christ rather than to the historical 
Jesus brings us into collision with those who 
hold that view. If you will run over the pages 
of an Evangelical hymn-book, the hymn-book 
used in the churches that are really consistent, 
you will find that a large proportion of the 
hymns are addressed to Christ as prayers, or 
adoration, or tributes of praise. But there is 
not one of them that any early disciple could 
have sung. There is not one of them that the 
Master would have approved. They are an 
affront to the truth for which he stood, namely, 
the adoration of the only God, whose revealer 



148 One World at a Time 



he was, whose interpreter he was, whose ex- 
pression in terms of human life we thoroughly 
believe him to be. But we must find out what 
he is, even though it brings us into collision 
with these sincere people who hold to the 
essential Deity of Jesus of Nazareth in more 
or less defined terms. And this collision is 
real. It is a point where we cannot give up, 
by so much as the slightest concession, our 
profound belief in the simple humanity of 
Jesus ; and the reasons are very simple. 

In the first place we have to take the Script- 
ures which record his life as we find them. 
There is not any reference to him except as 
human in any epistle of Paul, who seems not 
even to have known — at least not to have re- 
membered to state — any story of his unusual 
birth ; who, it would have seemed, must have 
mentioned Mary in writing to the churches 
that he sought to establish in the faith of 
Christ, if Mary was mother of the Lord, not 
only, but "mother of God" as well. In the 
Gospels there is no reference, except in 
the isolated passages in the first part of 
Matthew and the first part of Luke to 
Jesus as other than human. Mark's, which 
is the oldest, as we have the Gospels, be- 
gins with the baptism by John the Baptist, 



What is it to Believe in Christ? 149 



and ends with the burial of Christ. These 
two passages alone, in the prefaces to Mat- 
thew's and Luke's Gospels, of the whole mass 
of the New Testament, are the insufficient 
supports of a doctrine that has spread until it is 
like an inverted pyramid, standing upon these 
two points as the apex, and spreading its great 
base in the air. We cannot accept the view 
that Jesus was other than simply and purely 
human, for we think we know what he was. 
We ask others not to accept our statement, 
however, but to work their way back through 
the accumulated debris which has been de- 
posited generation after generation upon the 
plains of thought ; until, working their way 
back, or, to change the figure, cutting their 
way through the tangled thicket of opinion, by 
any process known to them, with the sharp 
cleavage of their logic, or with the disengaging 
power of their affection and sincere devotion, 
— so finding their way back by any method, 
they discover that one statement after another, 
as to how he was God, disappears, disappears, 
disappears, until they stand face to face with 
the disciples who dared rebuke him when they 
thought he was wrong, and dared lie upon his 
bosomwhen they thought that hewas in trouble; 
who tried to comfort him as one human soul 



One World at a Time 



would comfort another : such a review of the 
evidence finds only these two isolated texts as 
ground for a faith that characterises the whole 
thinking of the Evangelical churches. And 
why ? Because, having accepted the total de- 
pravity of man, they could not think of Jesus as 
really human. His character was too beautiful 
to allow that ; the majesty of his life forbade 
those to think meanly of him as human, — 
who thought meanly of man because he was 
human. They accept the total depravity of 
human nature and the story of the Fall of man, 
to which Jesus never refers in any record that 
is left to us ; it appears nowhere in any gospel 
in his words, — indeed, every utterance of his 
seems to be a denial of the total depravity of 
man or the Fall of man from original purity ; — 
having accepted the total depravity of man 
and its necessary corollary, the Fall of man in 
the beginning of the race, they needed the 
intervention of a Saviour to work out an atone- 
ment, not between them and sin, but between 
them and God. And so we insist it is the 
depth, the unconscious depth of profanity, 
the absolutely blasphemous attitude toward 
the great God, that our Father should be 
thought to be one who needs an atonement to 
reconcile himself to His children, whom He has 



What is it to Believe in Christ? i5 T 



made, and in whose care they have always 
been. We must differ with these, because we 
think we know what would have been the at- 
titude of Jesus toward the Father. 

In order to believe in Christ, not only must 
we realise what he was, but we must accept 
his leadership. The attitude of the great 
body of orthodox Christians who maintain 
the Deity of Christ as against ourselves be- 
lieving in his perfect humanity, and who 
charge us with not believing in Christ, may be 
expressed as devotion to a formula without any 
correspondent devotion to the destiny to which 
that formula should lead them in their thinking. 
It is amazing how many things are said that 
are not meant. Often a very good man on his 
knees before the Father of our Lord Jesus 
Christ, uses a phrase because it is in a prayer- 
book, that his soul protests against, that his 
mind denies, because, as he says, he " uses it 
waiting for something better to come along." 
Now the only way to get anything better, if 
you have what is not good, is to go and get 
it yourself. The man who, like Micawber, 
waits "for something to turn up," is far below 
the man who goes and "turns it up." The 
orthodox position, therefore, upon this point, 
is that they do not accept the leadership of 



15 2 One World at a Time 

Jesus really. Now I do not say that these 
people are not good people. When we say 
that they do not logically accept the leader- 
ship of Jesus, we do not mean that. They 
might have been absolutely good people, 
though they had never heard of Jesus. There 
are four and a half millions of good Buddhists 
who do not accept the leadership of Christ. 
I do not mean to asperse the characters of 
these people or their sincerity. I mean to say 
the habit of accepting opinions ready made 
makes against the power of using one's own 
reason. It is the assignment of your own 
intellect to the keeping of somebody else. In 
the Protestant, as in the Catholic, it is the 
same thing : The priest knows a thing ; I 
know the priest ; therefore I know the thing 
the priest knows. Now that is not a syl- 
logism. Those three conditions do not hang 
together. You can only know that which you 
have yourself discovered or had revealed to 
you in terms your consciousness approves, or 
that you have experienced in the contact with 
human life. Those are the only three ways 
of knowing anything. You must have known 
it by your experience, or must have accepted 
it in your consciousness, or must have dis- 
covered and verified it for yourself. That is 



What is it to Believe in Christ? 153 



not the attitude of those who hold to the leader- 
ship of Jesus as a formula. 

Now what is leadership in this sense ? It 
means we must adjust ourselves to the life of 
Christ so as to get his view of God. That is 
the first thing. If nothing in your religious 
experience were gained except a view of God, 
that would in itself be sufficient for the forma- 
tion of character and the direction of life ; and 
the use of Jesus, as we apprehend him, is to 
be a revealer of God to us in terms of human 
life. I do not want God revealed to me in 
terms of angelic life. I do not want Him re- 
vealed to me in terms of brute life. If the 
brute has any consciousness of the Ultimate 
Cause, to the bull God is a bull ; to the lion 
God is a lion ; to the eagle God is an eagle. 
But I am a man and I want to know what 
God is like in terms of human life. I can 
only know that by finding some life that is 
stirred with the sense of God; so "brought 
into moral coalescence, the human with the 
divine," in its relation to God, that it becomes 
to me the lens through which I look, by which 
the whole atmosphere is cleared and the stars 
are brought near, as the sidereal universe 
through the telescope becomes as though it 
were near and familiar. That Jesus of Naza- 



*54 



One World at a Time 



reth does for the believer who accepts his 
humanity. We try to get his view of God, 
which is a great deal better than getting a 
view of him and stopping there. That is 
what most people do. They come up to 
Christ, look in his face, picture his beauty to 
their imagination, idealise him to their senti- 
ment, worship before him, and forget utterly 
that he said, " I am the Way." But a way 
points some-whither ; it leads somewhere ; "I 
am the Truth." The truth is the expression 
of an ultimate reality ; " I am the Life," said 
he. Life was not self-existent in him. He 
was born into the world as we are born into 
the world. But, " I am the Life," proceeding 
from the Final Life of all. " No man," said 
he " cometh unto the Father but by me." His 
whole teaching in that, as in every other case, 
is that he is a means to an end, that end, the 
Father ; an approximate to an ultimate, that 
ultimate the Father. Our effort is to climb 
where he stands and see what he sees ; that is 
believing in him. No mountain climber ever 
yet climbed the Alps to any accessible height, 
where the guide had not gone before, or did 
not know the way ; and when he climbed, 
tied to his guide, the same rope around his 
waist and around the guide's waist ; — and 



What is it to Believe in Christ? 155 



when he reached the beetling cliffs to which 
he had climbed, and stood, perhaps, on top 
of the Matterhorn, or some great peak of 
Switzerland, he drew in his delight in panting, 
short breaths ; but he did not stand looking 
at the gttide. He gloried in the guide's 
strength ; he rejoiced in the guide's skill ; he 
had followed in the guide's footsteps ; but 
he tried to see what the guide saw. That is 
our attitude ; that is belief in Christ, — to get 
his view of God, and of life, and of human 
destiny. That is what we mean by saying 
that our business is " to discover the secret of 
Jesus." It is better than mere imitation, 
which is mechanical. It is trying to live the 
life he lived, in the terms of your life, which 
is a great deal better than living his life 
over again. At school you were told to write 
the thing you knew ; to make your composi- 
tion out of something that you really under- 
stood; to say the thing that was in your mind. 
How unsatisfactory it would have been, and 
how deadening to all your future knowledge 
of English literature or interest in English, 
if you had simply carried into the class-room 
time after time something you had copied out 
of some master of English style ! You would 
have imitated the style but lost the power to 



156 One World at a Time 



think in English. Our attitude is to find 
"the secret of Jesus," and to live his life over 
again in terms of our own life. 

Most of all, I think this criticism that we 
do not believe in Christ is offered to us be- 
cause of our refusal, as I have already said, 
of any theory of the atonement. But I 
assure you that there is no theory now ac- 
cepted as applying to the atonement which 
existed for the first nine hundred years of the 
Christian Church. The people in the pews 
are not expected to be experts in Church 
history ; but no minister in our faith can 
afford not to be. It is safe to say that 
any well-equipped Unitarian minister has to 
know the first three centuries better than 
the last three, if he is going to vindicate 
what he thinks about the early Church ; and 
I say with perfect frankness, and ask you 
to verify it, that no " mercantile " theory, 
nor " moral influence " theory, nor any one 
of the remaining twenty or more theories of 
the atonement as known in the early Church 
until after the ninth century. The theory of 
the early Church after the second century and 
until the time of Anselm and Abelard, with 
their contending theories, was that this earth 
had fallen into the hands of a malign power 



What is it to Believe in Christ? 157 



called Lucifer, Satan, the devil, the adversary, — 
that he was " the prince of this world" ; that 
there must be some provision made for get- 
ting it away from him ; God had lost control 
of part of His estate ; part of it had been " sold 
for taxes," as we would say, and had passed 
into the possession of another being called 
the devil. And Christ, in the councils of 
heaven, after the manner of the old Roman 
Horatii, stepped forward, or as David before 
Goliath, and offered to do battle for man 
and overthrow the enemy ; and Jesus being 
put to death, the bodily nature of Christ 
perished ; but that was only the vindication 
of his power as divine. In other words, as 
one of the old preachers of that time said : 
" God angled for the devil with the bait of 
Christ, and the devil did not know it had 
a hook in it." The hook was the Deity of 
Christ. It impaled the jaws of him who had 
overthrown the humanity of Christ. There 
is no human being in the world now who 
believes that, and yet for eight hundred years 
the Christian Church as a whole believed some 
such theory. Then came the theories of 
Anselm and Abelard, followed by one theory 
after another, until Horace Bushnell in the 
middle of the last century taught the "moral 



158 One World at a Time 

influence " theory ; that is, that the sinner 
comes to Christ, for whose sake Christ dies, 
and the sinner is broken-hearted by the sight 
of what sin has cost, and turns to God because 
sin is overthrown by the vision of the suffer- 
ing Messiah. Then they said, who believed 
the other views, that Horace Bushnell did not 
believe in Christ. That is an easy charge ; 
and is as irrelevant as it is slanderous. The 
view held by Bushnell is now held by thou- 
sands who call themselves orthodox — and en- 
tertain toward those who differ with them 
the same critical attitude from which Bushnell 
suffered. 

Finally, we try to think what Jesus of Naz- 
areth would like us to do. We do not simply 
ask what would he like us to be. I think 
what he would like us to be is to be our 
best selves, enlightened by his example, in- 
spired by his spirit. He would like us to 
be our best selves ; but what would he like 
us to do ? When the Unitarian leaders of 
the last century answered that question, Doro- 
thea Dix liberated the insane from their 
chains, and turned the madhouse from a 
place of torture into a place of healing. 
When Abraham Lincoln and Charles Sumner 
and William Lloyd Garrison, and the others 



What is it to Believe in Christ? 159 



of our faith in the anti-slavery contest, together 
with the good Quaker Whittier, who himself 
was a believer in the humanity of Jesus, asked 
what Christ would have them to do about 
the slave, they contended for his freedom even 
to intemperance of utterance and action. John 
Brown's ill-considered raid was the very ex- 
pression of what he thought Christ would 
have him to do. The Abolition Party of the 
North all asked just one question, " What 
would Jesus of Nazareth have me do ?" And 
four to six millions of people were freed, 
because the nation arose and answered that 
question. There were very good people on 
the other side of the question. They said : 
" What does the Old Testament teach about 
slavery ? Did not Abraham have slaves ? 
Did not David, who was 1 after God's own 
heart,' have slaves ? Did not the whole of 
the Old Testament recognise slavery ? " They 
refused to add concubinage and polygamy 
and gambling and all the other evils that 
were practised in the twilight times of the 
Old Testament They forgot to ask whether 
it was " a square deal," as we would say now, 
between Esau and Jacob as to the birthright. 
They only said, " What did the Old Testament 
allow as to slavery ?" It was a very different 



160 One World at a Time 



question from asking, "What would Jesus 
have me to do about slavery ? " So this 
country has been made over by people who 
have asked themselves that question ; and in 
the answering of the race-question, the leaders 
have been Unitarians. I offer you this as my 
challenge, — to say whether the great propor- 
tion of those who have been moved by that 
motive, and regulated in the method of their 
thinking by that motive, were not believers 
in Christ. The race-question which now 
convulses the South would be settled if 
the faith of the Unitarian Churches prevailed 
there. 

I desire in one single word to say that 
to believe in Christ is to repeat his life, 
not in words, but to repeat his life in 
terms of life. There is many a thing that he 
said that you have to take with a difference. 
As Lecky shows in The Map of Life, you 
cannot put up over any savings-bank the in- 
junction, " Take no thought for the morrow." 
You cannot bring into any court of justice the 
statement, "If a man take thy coat, give him 
thy cloak also." All these, that are the nat- 
ural utterances of his time, have to be ad- 
justed to the really higher ethics of this time. 
Believing in Christ is repeating his life in 



What is it to Believe in Christ? 161 



terms of our life ; to indulge in a heresy 
hunt because somebody does not believe in 
Christ, illustrates what was said in a recent 
theological controversy, " It was like a battle 
of two dogs in a flower-garden, that settled 
nothing but the flowers." That is what al- 
ways happens. The beautiful things perish in 
the time of controversy ; and there is nothing 
so true as to the charge that we do not believe 
in Christ, when it is followed up by the as- 
perity on either side which that charge pro- 
vokes, as the complaint that " he is wounded 
in the house of his friends." 

The following poem by Arthur Munby has 
come under my notice in the Spectator as I 
close this chapter ; and it so well phrases what 
I have been claiming for faith in Christ that I 
add its strong appeal to my own plea. 

CHRISTUS CUNCTATOR 

So far beyond the things of Space — 
So high above the things of Time — 

And yet, how human is thy face, 

How near, how neighbourly, thy clime ! 

Thou wast not born to fill our skies 
With lustre from some alien zone : 

Thy light, thy love, thy sympathies, 
Thy very essence, are our own. 



One World at a Time 



Thy mission, thy supreme estate, 

Thy life among the pious poor, 
Thy lofty language to the great ; 

Thy touch, so tender and so sure ; 

Thine eyes, whose looks are with us yet ; 

Thy voice, whose echoes do not die ; 
Thy words, which none who hear forget, 

So piercing are they and so nigh ; 

Thy balanced nature, always true 
And always dauntless and serene, 

Which did the deeds none else could do, 
And saw the sights none else had seen, 

And ruled itself from first to last 

Without an effort or a pause, 
By no traditions of the Past — 

By nothing, save its own pure laws ; 

All this, and thousand traits beside, 
Unseen till these at least are known, 

May serve to witness far and wide 
That thou art he, and thou alone. 

But oh, how high thy spirit soars 
Above the men who tell thy tale ! 

They labour with their awkward oars 
And try to show thee — and they fail. 

They saw thee ; yet they fail like us 

Who also strive to limn thee out, 
And say that thou art thus or thus, 

And carve our crumbling creeds with Doubt; 



What is it to Believe in Christ ? 



Or build them up with such a Faith 
And such a narrow, niggard Love 

As clings to what some other saith, 
Or moves not, lest some other move. 

Ah, none shall see thee as thou art, 
Or know thee for himself at all, 

Until he has thee in his heart, 

And heeds thy whisper or thy call, 

And feels that in thy sovran will 
Eternal manhood grows not old, 

But keeps its prime, that all may fill 
Thy large, illimitable fold. 



CHAPTER VII 



"A COLD AND INTELLECTUAL 
RELIGION" 

I SUPPOSE there is nothing about which 
people so differ as the weather. Some 
people like a dull day, because they enjoy 
their own melancholy ; and others almost 
dread a radiant day because it makes them 
restless and long for the woods and " God's 
good outdoors " ; and between these how great 
a multitude of those who, when they wish to 
know whether it is cold, consult the thermo- 
meter, and whether it will rain, inspect the 
barometer. In the same room it often hap- 
pens that one will say, "It seems to me dry 
and hot, so that I can scarcely breathe " ; whilst 
the person addressed will say, " I have a con- 
stant feeling of cold at the back of my arms, 
— a little shiver somewhere about the spine." 
I use this parable of the weather to point the 
fact, that when, in the contemplation of religion, 
a critic says it is cold, the simplest answer is, 

164 



" A Cold, Intellectual Religion " 165 



that all questions of cold and heat are referable 
always to the temperature of the complainant. 
It is cold to him who is cold, and it is warm to 
him who is warm ; and there is no settling the 
fact by the barometer or thermometer or any 
scientific registry of facts ; there is no settling 
the question of comfort except by the circula- 
tion of the comfortable. 

Now, we Unitarians are quite comfortable. 
We are called complacent, self-satisfied. Let 
us thank God there is a complacency possible 
in God's good world, which God has so divinely 
ordered and so supremely and infinitely ad- 
ministers. It would be unwholesome if human 
beings in God's world were so sin-ridden or 
sorrow-laden that they could never be quiet in 
spirit, nor complacent ; but to be self-satisfied 
is quite another matter ; and no human being 
can tell that another human being is self-satis- 
fied without being that very self, because quiet 
of the external manner may very well be a 
mask to hide inward convulsion. We wear our 
masks not only for protection but for decency's 
sake ; and it is well that the world shall get 
the idea in good company that people are 
satisfied enough not to make others dissatisfied. 
A Japanese, who is the very perfection of good- 
breeding, will smile while he tells you of the 



1 66 One World at a Time 



death of someone near to him, — not because 
death is not the same thing in Japan where peo- 
ple love as in America where people love, but 
because the idea has been ingrained through 
generations that it is the business of life to 
make life easy for the other, and that we have 
no right to load our burdens, even for our own 
relief, on other souls. It is the high prerog- 
ative of souls to take burdens from others, but 
it is not ours to give them. So that in the last 
analysis we say that the question of whether it 
is cold or not is a question of the temperature 
of the complainant, and there is no way of 
making the constantly chilly soul warm by 
any external pressure or kindling from the 
outside. 

My answer to those who are critics of our 
faith, who say it is a cold religion, is that you 
must carry your own coals. If I am going 
into an arctic region I will see to it that pro- 
vision is made for fuel which is heat producing. 
I venture into the arctic cold, but I would not 
venture unprovided. So that to anyone who 
says an Unitarian Church is a cold place — the 
simple answer is that it is cold to you. Those 
who are accustomed to the atmosphere need 
no artificial protection ; their circulation — the 
intensity of their own feeling — warms them ; 



" A Cold, Intellectual Religion " 167 



and you must bring your own coals if you 
would come. 

Take a step farther. To the complaint that 
it is a cold and an intellectual religion let me 
answer that the emotions are not the test of 
reality. We do reach God by the affections 
and not by the intellect : there is no question 
but that the path to the Infinite is through the 
affections and not through any speculative 
faculty whatever ; but the affections are not the 
emotions. The emotions bloom upon the root 
and stalk of the affections ; but it is not the 
flower that is the thing ; it is the bloom of the 
thing itself that is the emotion ; and affection 
is not judged by its flowering ; it is judged by 
its constancy and the power of self-sacrifice 
that is in it ; and to the gay and jocund nature 
it may be quite possible that there is no depth 
and power of loyalty whatever. It does not 
follow that this is so ; but it may be so. That 
for which men go to the stake, — whether it be 
the quick incineration of some martyr fire, or 
the slow burning away of life under some per- 
petual sorrow for love's sake, — that which takes 
them to such martyrdom, is no mere quick and 
sudden overflow of emotion, but the alliance 
of the soul unto reality, for which it must die, 
whether by slow torture or quick fire ; whether 



1 68 One World at a Time 



in the tragedy that has no record, or in the 
martyrdom that writes the page of history ; it 
is the consciousness of alliance with the real 
and eternal, and this cannot be made depend- 
ent upon any days emotion. 

I do not decry emotion in religion. If it 
were not for emotion we would have few 
prayers and no hymns. All hymns are born 
of spiritual emotion, and prayers are wafted 
upon the aspiration of the soul's outbreathing. 
Its inspiration comes to it and it breathes 
again unto high Heaven the thing which has 
been inspired in it. But when all has been 
said and done, in religion as in life it is reality 
that counts; it is constancy that is dependable; 
it is the marriage of the soul to an abiding 
principle that remains. We reach God by the 
affections : it is not possible that any religion 
could be purely intellectual. 

Now if you will recall for one moment the 
reaction of the Protestant Reformation you 
will realise that it was a reaction violent in 
feeling and in method ; its reverberation has 
been in the Dissenting churches ever since ; it 
has set a kind of tone ; it has been a drum- 
beat, a rally, a bugle-call, a championship to 
enter the lists against the foe. But it has no 
more value as the expression of fact than the 



" A Cold, Intellectual Religion " 169 



great musical history of the Roman Catholic 
Church. The music is built upon the sestheti- 
cism of human life, and is a legitimate con- 
tribution to it. It was born of it, bred in it, 
returned to it as a contribution to the aesthetic 
in human life ; and the Protestant revival, 
whether in the Church of England, in the Ger- 
man Reformation, or in the sturdy contribution 
of Methodism in the eighteenth century in 
England, — when it in turn floated upon the 
tides of emotion a higher life than that which 
the English Church knew, — no matter from 
what source it comes, nor to what end it 
moves, it is, so far as its emotion is concerned, 
but an incident ; it is not the very thing 
itself. 

In the last and final statement, Religion 
has this for its guarantee, in the words 
of Martineau, that " for all time the differ- 
ence must be infinite between the partisan 
of beliefs and the man whose heart is set 
upon reality." In the man whose heart 
is set upon reality you have the registry 
of fewer emotions, but when all the efferv- 
escence has subsided, when all the quick 
breath of adulation and praise and adoration 
has gone by, he shall be found abiding, as 
one who has found " the shadow of a great 



170 



One World at a Time 



rock in a weary land " ; his " heart is set upon 
reality." 

I come back for a moment to consider the 
statement that religion cannot be purely in- 
tellectual, for the reason that it must be 
thoroughly rational. Now, rationalism in re- 
ligion, which so many people dread, includes 
the speculative faculty, which is the instru- 
ment of inquiry ; includes the faculty of the 
critic which is the discriminating faculty ; in- 
cludes great affection, which is the conserving 
faculty. To be wholly rational a man must 
be clear ; but to say that religion is purely in- 
tellectual — meaning that it dwells in the upper 
chambers and clear air of speculative beliefs — 
is not to state what can be true of religion as 
a whole. If that objection were well taken, 
it would be our condemnation. We do claim 
that reason is the great final appeal ; but by 
reason we mean the whole man. He is a 
rational being who " looks before and 
after " ; whose " roots are in the soil and whose 
head is in the sun " ; who has reasons for his 
action, motives for his behaviour ; whose affec- 
tions are the root of his principles and whose 
principles are the regulation of his affections, 
the one the sanctification of the other. Re- 
ligion has to do with the whole man ; and 



" A Cold, Intellectual Religion" 17 1 



religion must be rational or else it is super- 
stition ; and so far as it lacks rationality it 
partakes of the superstitious. 

We are set against all superstition. But 
we examine the myth and miracle as we 
examine the fact ; for the myth is as legiti- 
mate, — a flower growing upon a fruitful stem, 
and the miracle as legitimate, — a fruit growing 
in a credulous age, — as any fact that history 
reveals ; and the myth and the miracle are 
part of the poetry of religion ; for there is a 
poetic interpretation of religion which is as 
legitimate as its facts. 

Religion is not a matter of statistics. You 
cannot sum up its effects by the number of 
" souls saved." That is a curious phrase in the 
Book of Acts, which records that in one day 
three thousand, and on another day five thou- 
sand, proclaimed themselves disciples of Jesus ; 
the record reads, " And the Lord added to the 
Church daily those who should be saved." It 
is a question of character, fitness, and adjust- 
ment, "who should be saved"; the potential 
mood coming in there is the interpretation of 
the idea. So that when we contemplate a re- 
vival of religion we never fail to welcome it, 
but when it is over we wonder what will be 
left. 



17 2 One World at a Time 

Horace Bushnell pointed out to the Con- 
gregationalism of his day, that " Christian 
nurture " is the prime consideration in the 
Christian life. It is one thing to be born into 
the world, and it is another thing to be well 
nursed to self-supporting life. I should say, 
that however many souls may be borne into 
the Kingdom of God upon some tide of emo- 
tion, you can only know what has lasted, re- 
mained, by the achievements of those who 
have constantly, steadily, loyally worked to 
bring in the Kingdom of God in their turn. 
Many a revival of religion has left the shore- 
line strewed with the exhausted souls of peo- 
ple whose whole psychical nature has been 
involved in some tempest of emotion ; it may 
be magnetism, or some mere phase of the 
multiform psychic development of which we 
know so little ; but it can be as surely produced 
by artificial means as it can be perceived 
when it is natural. This tide of emotional 
and psychic sentiment is not to be deplored 
any more than it is to be sought. He who 
seeks it is to be deplored ; but he who de- 
plores it knows not all of the human soul. 

But religion in its last analysis must be 
rational ; that is, it must be made up of these 
constituents : there must be an awakened 



A Cold, Intellectual Religion" 173 



soul to which it comes ; it must be an alert 
spiritual nature which participates in it, and 
that spiritual nature must involve the whole 
man from top to toe, — from the highlands of 
his nature down to the very basilar instincts ; 
the whole man is involved. It is not given to 
us simply to feel deeply, but to think clearly 
on the thought side of religion. It has been 
well said by one of our thoughtful people : 
" There are certain natures upon whom the 
destiny has fallen of deep feeling and high 
thinking ; and there is no rescue for them but 
in deeper feeling and in higher thinking." 
Many elements are involved in religion : a 
basis of relief, which is intellectual apprehen- 
sion ; a principle of action, which is the motive 
of conduct ; and adjustment of the affections, 
which is the unfailing source of devotion both 
toward God and man. To the soul intent 
upon the religious life there must be a strug- 
gle to attain these. There are some, how- 
ever, who grow weary of the struggle ; they 
fall supine upon some ready-made profession 
of faith and say that the Unitarian churches are 
cold and purely intellectual places ; they have 
not proved their criticism true ; they have 
only registered the fact that they are tired 
because they are not strong, — that is all ; and 



174 



One World at a Time 



they belong in some of the hospital sects 
which take care of tired people who are not 
very strong. I should say without the slightest 
hesitancy to such people, " You belong here, 
and here," and point them, as far as my advice 
would go, to the place to which they should go. 

If a man in any congregation belonging to 
the Unitarian faith were to fall into that re- 
laxed intellectual state in which he should say 
to me, " I must have authority, some man's 
statement for the final fact " ; if I were con- 
vinced that that claim was grounded in the 
necessity of his nature, and that there was no 
resource for him in independent and rational 
life, I would commend him at once to en- 
roll himself somewhere in the multitude of 
churches of the Roman Catholic faith, be- 
cause there, at least, he would get authority 
that has fifteen hundred years back of it, — 
not always preserving the continuity of his- 
tory, not always adorned by beauty of life, 
but sometimes sanctified and purified by the 
most celestial experience the world has ever 
known ; but it is the radical distinction be- 
tween such a Church and the Unitarian faith 
that the one is based upon authority, and the 
other stands unabashed before the tribunal 
of reason. There are people who must be 



" A Cold, Intellectual Religion " 175 



Roman Catholics by the structure of their very 
spines, — they must be adherents of the Roman 
Catholic Church ; they do not stand for any- 
thing — they adhere to something ; just as 
there are people who must be Quakers, to 
whom all symbolism is an horror ; to whom all 
ritual is an offence ; for whom " the inner 
light " alone shines ; and its radiance from that 
central place of power of the human soul 
shines daily upon every act of life ; they must 
belong to the Society of Friends. And if 
some young girl or lad should say of the So- 
ciety of Friends that it was cold or formal in 
its beliefs, that they must go to some em- 
broidered ritual, to some modern phantasm of 
religion, — they must believe in some painted 
hell of which they might be afraid, some 
mythical heaven before which they might 
prostrate themselves in imaginative delight, — 
saying this they simply show that the faith of 
their fathers and mothers has not yet been 
awakened by spiritual experience in their 
lives ; and they are like the people who would 
say, on the one hand, " We must be clothed " 
(yes, for warmth and decency), and, on the 
other, " What is the latest fashion in clothes ? " 
(That has nothing to do with warmth and de- 
cency). Such claims in the name of religion 



176 



One World at a Time 



are on the mere fringe of the mind ; it is 
not even an emotion ; it is the slight scum 
that rises upon the pool of thought, and may 
be skimmed off, and may every season form 
again according to the fashion of the time. 
That is neither thought nor feeling ; that is 
simply vapid and inane trifling with Eternal 
Verities. 

Let me call attention to a consideration 
that must never be lost sight of. What is 
the object of religion ? I have no hesit- 
ancy in saying that it is the formation of 
character. If it does that, it is good so far as 
that is done. If it does anything else, not 
doing that, it is evil. If the Roman Catholic 
faith saps the foundations of reason it is so 
far evil ; for it produces the saintly character 
in perhaps the most useless form of life that 
the world has ever undertaken to follow, — the 
monk, who sits in his monastery, and the nun 
who fades out in her cloister. Still, the Cath- 
olic faith produces often the sublimest type of 
spiritual devotion, — the sublimated character. 
If the Protestant Episcopal Church, for in- 
stance (since I must be specific in these il- 
lustrations), gathers to itself for prayer by 
quotation those who can never pray for them- 
selves, the people who like to have their 



"A Cold, Intellectual Religion" 177 



religious services mapped out for them, — there 
is nothing to say but that they are that kind 
of people; but the test still remains, — does 
character result ? Many a time, yes ; because 
many a diffident soul in this world, meaning 
some time to go upon some errand of love, to 
find his mate, has been encouraged by reading 
the love-passages of other biographers, and 
has learned the habit of the lover's mind from 
the printed page, regulating his instincts and 
adjusting his emotions by what has been 
proved lovable and adorable. It is true, but 
it is remote : it seems rather a playing at 
love ; a childish make-believe which the grand 
passion of life shall sweep away when it floods 
the soul. 

I do not wish to say one word depreciatory 
of any faith that makes character. I do not 
care how it is made, of what stuff it is made, 
how long it takes, what sorrows it involves, 
what joys it insures, what high-hearted hope 
it engenders, what great, black despair the 
soul passes through in the process, if in the 
end character be formed, of which the tests 
are three : First, how does a man feel when 
he is living with himself ? Second, how does 
anybody feel who is living with him ? Third, 

what place does he take in the social order, 

12 



178 One World at a Time 



and how bear his share of the social respons- 
ibility ? The religion which does that well, 
and in the ratio in which it does it, is the 
religion for that man, whatever it may be for 
the next ; for all forms of faith are 

" . . . but broken lights of Thee, 
And Thou, O Lord, art more than they." 

A single suggestion. Much of the warmth 
of the so-called emotion of religion is impos- 
sible to us, and ought to be impossible in this 
age to anybody. For instance, there is no 
human being called by our name who has the 
slightest interest in that form of theologic 
presentment which belonged to the chromo 
period of ecclesiastical art, which depicts an 
uninteresting Heaven largely derived from Mil- 
ton's Paradise Lost. The Book of Revela- 
tion also is so often quoted for proof-texts, 
that it seems well to say it does not re- 
fer to Heaven, from the first to the last. It is 
the story of the New Jerusalem on earth, the 
vision of the regeneration of human society. 
But the Divines, so-called, who live their little 
lives tied to their body of divinity, after the 
manner of Paul when he cried, " Who shall 
deliver me from the body of this death ? " — for 
a " body of divinity " is always a corpse, — 



" A Cold, Intellectual Religion " 179 



these Divines have pictured Heaven to make 
men want to go there ; but they have never 
made them in any haste to die. They may 
also picture Hell to make sinners want to stay 
away, and it is an interesting experiment in 
the ghost -lore and spook -lore of primitive 
faiths, but it has nothing to do with religion. 

If a human being goes to an incurable hell 
there is no God ; an incurable hell and a lov- 
ing God cannot be in the universe at the 
same time. You cannot have an incurable 
hell and an unexhausted compassion at the 
same time ; with all such aspects of doctrine 
we have nothing to do. We cannot make 
people feel, if that makes them feel. They 
are in the condition of those who cannot sit 
down and read a drama and see it enacted 
in the mind ; they must have melodrama on 
the stage, — the " barn-storming " type of act- 
ing, and all the other exciting conditions of a 
half-developed art. That is their situation, 
and they must get it where they can. We 
cannot furnish it, thank God ! If that con- 
stitutes the chill, then it is the chill of early 
spring, in which all the buds are swelling in 
spite of the chill of the atmosphere, because 
the sap is running up and the vital forces 
of the world are reviving and calling the 



i8o 



One World at a Time 



summer to banish laggard winter from the 
world. The man who feels this chill must 
go back into his shell until he has been 
furnished the temperature which his thin 
blood invites. 

For the most of us God's outdoors in the 
open weather is good enough, and we need 
neither heaven nor hell of the old proportions, 
nor yet a God of the old revolting type, 
" to make us feel." The eternal compassion, 
the unfailing goodness of God is not en- 
throned now remotely and alien from man ; 
it is simply in the world to rational faith ; 
kindled in all its emotions by unfailing affec- 
tion, He is enthroned in every worshipping 
heart ; so that a new Deity needs a new 
worship, so much larger is the fact of God ; 
and prayer must take on an adoration which 
the old type of supplication would not allow ; 
and praise must sound in terms so great that 
its old feebleness shall seem like the plaintive 
echo of spirits in prison longing for the light 
of the outer world. " Great hopes are for 
great souls ! " 



CHAPTER VIII 



"A DIFFICULT RELIGION" 

WHAT people mean by a form of faith 
being " difficult " may be of two kinds ; 
either they may mean that it is difficult to 
understand, or they may mean that it is diffi- 
cult to carry out in practical living. These 
are the only difficulties that confront people 
in the consideration of a religious faith : 
either their minds do not grasp it easily, 
or their lives do not adjust themselves to 
it readily. 

Now, what do we mean by a statement of 
religion being difficult to understand ? We 
mean that its definitions are hard to come at. 
That is the only thing there is to understand 
in religion ; all the rest is experience. For 
instance, when one declares that he misses 
an elaborated theological statement in Uni- 
tarianism, we answer : That is our boast, that 
we do not make an elaborated theological 
statement. For if you will analyse any of 

181 



182 



One World at a Time 



the histories of dogma running through the 
Christian centuries, you will discover that 
they are taken up, for the most part, with 
what no human being ever could know ; that 
is, they are discussing questions that are not 
only impossible of determination, but they 
are impossible of adjustment to practical 
living. How can any human being know 
whether God is one, or three, or a million ? 
" No man hath seen God at any time." If 
I am asked if the unity of God is theolo- 
gically true, I say, I do not know whether 
it is theologically true. I only know that it 
is philosophically necessary, because you can- 
not get on in the study of a universe that 
has no centre. You cannot get on in the 
study of forces that are modes of manifest- 
ation of one energy if you are not sure that 
the energy is one. You are immediately 
caught in the snare and stumble on the 
difficulties of contradictory first causes. The 
very phrase is contradictory ; there cannot 
be two first causes. I am not concerned 
as to whether the unity of God is theo- 
logically true ; I am only concerned with the 
question whether it is philosophically neces- 
sary in order to my thinking, and whether 
it focuses the mind best, and brings the 



" A Difficult Religion " 183 



human energies to their acts of devotion 
and acts of service with least distraction. 
People who want a theory of the Trinity go 
browsing back through the various pasture- 
lands of theological outcropping, and gather 
here a form of tritheism, and there a modal 
form of manifestation ; and when they are 
through it is something no human being 
can know. So with regard to the question 
of the deity of Jesus of Nazareth. People 
say, " It is so easy to believe that he was 
God." And no one of them can tell what 
God is like. They really mean what Starr 
King — our splendid Starr King — said when 
he declared, " O God, Thou art an infinite 
Christ." In other words, he meant what they 
mean, that the divine quality that is in Jesus 
of Nazareth, his perfect manhood and hu- 
manity, are in such terms of sublimity and 
grandeur and purity, that if we could have 
them infinitely extended, we would have a 
Being whom we could worship, and it would 
be God. That is what they mean when they 
say, " It is so easy to believe that Jesus is 
God." In saying this their logic breaks down, 
but their impulse is just right. So, if a man 
should come to me and say, as men have 
said, " What would you do with me in the 



1 84 One World at a Time 



Unitarian Church if I came in and said that 
Jesus is God ? " I would say to him at once : 
" I would not quarrel with you at all. I 
would infinitely rather have you say that 
he is God than that he is 'mere man.'" 
That is the most disagreeable phrase in the 
language to a Unitarian ear, — " mere man." 
For no human being knows what " mere man " 
is, any more than, as someone has said, he 
knows what " mere Alps " or " mere solar 
system " is. We do not use diminutive terms 
when we speak of the finest things human 
nature has ever seen. If a man says, " Jesus 
was God," he would be mistaken in the fact, 
but if he said, " Jesus was mere man," that 
would be a mistake in his morale. In one 
instance he would be exalting the human be- 
yond its proportions ; in the other instance 
he would be degrading it below his respect. 
The first is an intellectual misapprehension ; 
the second is a moral error. So when we 
make a distinction between deity and divinity, 
we are encountered by people who say : " It is 
extremely hard to understand. What is the 
difference between deity and divinity ? You 
say 'Jesus is divine; all humanity is divine.' 
What do you mean ? " I mean that it has in 
it the stuff that God can show Himself in. 



"A Difficult Religion" 185 



That is to be divine. But there is but " one 
God, the Father, whose we are, and whom 
we serve." We are all stuff that He can make 
Himself manifest in. Suppose you have a 
sculptor with every ideal of art in his mind, 
with all the beautiful visions of his mind, 
seeking expression in some material that is fit. 
Phidias could not have made his figure for 
the Acropolis out of sponge. He needed 
gold and ivory. He needed workable material 
that was susceptible of fine finish. He needed 
the gold's lustre and the ivory's shine, and 
the pliability of each to the graver's tool. If 
he had taken sponge or cork, or some porous 
substance, he might have had an idea like 
God, but when he got through he would have 
had a thing like a sponge. That is what we 
mean by the divine quality in human nature, 
and in Jesus, its best representative ; and 
the only reason that people find it difficult 
to understand is that their minds are sophis- 
ticated by theological preconceptions ; and 
there is a law in physics that you cannot put 
two things in the same place at the same time. 
If the mind is filled up with theological junk, 
the only thing to do in order to find Unitari- 
anism easy, is to clear out the old stock and 
start in business from the basis of something 



1 86 One World at a Time 



that the world wants. So, in all the history 
of dogma, people miss the things they have 
somehow or other attached to religion. I 
remember distinctly the first day on which, 
when I was twenty years of age, there came 
to me the conception that religion was some- 
thing that could be stated in terms of soul, 
and was not necessarily stated in terms of 
theological definition ; and I gathered that 
from the earliest book of Dr. Martineau, En- 
deavors after the Christian Life. I remem- 
ber standing up in the middle of my room, a 
young Methodist preacher in the country, in 
Maryland, and opening that book, and saying : 
" Here is a discovery. Here is a man who 
tells about religion in terms of soul. If he is 
dealing with Christ, it is not in terms of an 
atonement. If he is dealing with God, it is 
not in terms of a Trinity. If he is dealing 
with the future life, it is not in terms of heaven 
and hell. It is all in terms of soul." To 
anybody who has had the other training, 
that comes with a shock and surprise. The 
student who has been taken out of the secul- 
arism of his life and put under the training 
of academic professors in a theological semin- 
ary gets caught in the mesh of the net, so 
that he does not swim clear for quite a while, 



"A Difficult Religion" 187 



no matter how deep the sea is, nor how 
pellucid the waves. So they say Unitarian- 
ism is difficult, because of the trailing re- 
mainder of theory in which they tangle their 
feet when they are trying to be free. 

Now when we come to the second form of 
difficulty — not the difficulty of understanding, 
for our scheme of life, our method of looking 
at things is perfectly simple — but when we 
come to the other, the task of adjusting life to 
it, there is a real difficulty. I have no interest in 
easy religion. Easy thinking is apt to be foolish 
thinking. Easy ethics is either morals turned 
loose, not girded as to the loin, not tightened as 
to the purpose ; or else it is small moralities ; 
and there is a great mass of people in the congre- 
gations of the Christian churches who are best 
satisfied when there are being peddled out to 
them small moralities, — a kind of retail busi- 
ness in " fancy notions " in religion. They are 
perfectly satisfied under those conditions. Now 
I have not the slightest interest in that. The 
religious life should be difficult in its thinking, 
difficult in its purpose, difficult in its struggle, 
to the point where it is victorious, in some 
phase of experience, and from that time on 
that phase of it, at least, becomes easy. Why 
should the apprentice make infinite blunders 



i88 



One World at a Time 



in his craft ? Why should the artist struggle 
through years of preparation ? Why should 
the medical student find the utmost difficulty 
in getting anybody to let him experiment 
upon him ? Why should any of the crafts 
and skills of life come only by infinite strug- 
gle, outlay of effort, mind, and exertion the 
most strenuous and insistent, and the relio-ious 
life, which is the science of manhood, the re- 
ligious life, which is the splendid achievement 
of the human soul, — the making of a human 
soul, which is the only business you have in 
hand. — why should that come easily to peo- 
ple who six days out of the week are plunged 
in a bocr of daily duties, and come out on Sun- 
day to sun themselves for an hour ? The fact 
is, the religious life ought to be difficult, if it 
is worth while. I do not mean to say it is 
difficult because it is unnatural, abnormal, or 
supernatural. It is the natural that is so diffi- 
cult. In a group of sycophants it is difficult 
for a sincere man to speak the truth. In a 
group of traders, by some occult process of 
the markets, it is difficult for a man who has 
something to sell and knows its value, either 
to set his price or to get it. A man said to 
me, when I asked him why two immortal souls 
should be six weeks buying a horse, "If we 



"A Difficult Religion" 189 



came to terms within three days, we should 
each think the other had cheated him ! " It is 
the natural that is difficult. In a period of court 
manners, the natural man is called brusque 
and lacking in the diplomatic address of the 
court. So with regard to the whole range of 
life. Our first struggle is to get back to the 
simplicities of nature. Any woman in the 
midst of " the season " will tell you that much of 
her time is given to the study of what is ex- 
pected of her, to the study of the conventions 
that cloister her on every side, to the weigh- 
ing of probabilities as to the effect of this or 
that method of life, dress, and behaviour. 
The inanities of this sort that come to a min- 
ister's knowledge would make a comic issue of 
the book of life if it were not for the tragic 
waste involved. And all for want of sim- 
plicity, directness, and naturalness of life. 
Somebody starts out who is perfectly natural ; 
and he is immediately called Bohemian, irregu- 
ular, daring. He is living his own life on his 
own terms. Of course, he must moderate his 
own terms to conform to the social contract, 
for he is not living alone, he is living in society. 
I use this illustration simply to call your at- 
tention to the fact that it is not because re- 
ligion is abnormal, unnatural, supernatural, but 



igo One World at a Time 

absolutely an expression of nature, that it is 
difficult to conform to its simplest require- 
ments. 

What is involved, then, in the Unitarian 
faith, as it applies to life ? 

First, passion for the Truth. There is a very 
good definition given of the true, the good, and 
the beautiful, that "The true is what is ; the 
good is what ought to be ; and the beautiful is 
what is as it ought to be." That is a very good 
definition ; and if we will just think for a mo- 
ment how far we live aside from that require- 
ment, how far we are from demanding what is, 
— rather asking to hear what we can bear, and 
to see what we ought to gaze upon, and to walk 
by paths that are safe, going cannily even then, 
—when we realise that this is the common de- 
mand, then the passion for the truth, as the 
thing that is, comes before the soul as almost 
an impossible ideal. And yet in a world of 
fancies, the only Infallible Pope is the fact. 
The fact is the only infallible thing in the 
world ; and the search for the thing that is, as 
to the soul, as to the soul's endeavour, as to the 
will of God, as to the adjustment of the right 
relations of life, as to character, — the passion 
for that marks a demand that is difficult, but 
is as necessary as it is difficult, if our interest 



" A Difficult Religion " 191 



is in the forming of character, in the living of 
the higher life. And by the higher life I simply 
mean human life ; by the lower life, brute life. 
The higher life is the human life : carried to its 
infinite extension, you get The Christ ; carried 
to its infinite possibilities, you get the humanity 
of God. 

So we are given, not only to the passion for 
the truth, but to the love of goodness. Often 
the incisive, the far-down, deep trouble with us 
is that men do not believe in the triumph of 
goodness. Men who believe in that would 
stake everything on it ; but you will meet other 
men at the crossing of the roads of some moral 
action, and if you could look into their minds, if 
you could know what they were thinking about, 
almost unconsciously to themselves, at the 
cross-roads between right and wrong, where 
that road leads to death, and this to life, — you 
would find them standing there wondering if 
there be not some short road across lots ; they 
spend their energy and power of mind and 
strength upon a nice balancing of probabilities, 
as to whether they can sail close to the reefs 
of wrong-doing and yet escape. They spend 
upon that question energies of soul and mind 
that would make saints of them if it were ap- 
plied to the real development of the spiritual 



i9 2 One World at a Time 



life. Our real trouble is that we do not believe 
in goodness. We worship smartness ; we 
worship cleverness ; we worship wealth. What 
a sickening thing it is to have the papers con- 
stantly filled with just two items : one, the fam- 
ilies that have gone to pieces over night ; the 
other, the fortunes that have been made in the 
last twenty-four hours ! The triumph of good- 
ness is better than the divorce court ; and the 
vindication of goodness is better than the for- 
tune of a millionaire. I do not go so far as 
the proverb that says, " Better is a dinner of 
herbs." That might be very well for a man who 
had everything and could make proverbs for 
people who had nothing, as Solomon did. But 
the real necessity is, that the man in the rough 
and tumble of life — the man who is underneath 
the crowd that is piled on top of him — if he 
would save himself alive, must believe in the 
ultimate triumph of goodness. Failure here is 
the only infidelity left in the world. A man 
cannot philosophically say, "There is no God." 
We have worked out of the materialism in 
which it was said that man had no soul. That 
Slough of Despond has been waded, and we 
are on firm land, philosophically and scientifi- 
cally. The only real infidelity is that of the 

man who prefers to get on, no matter how 
13 



11 A Difficult Religion " 193 



soon he may have to get off. His ideal of 
success is accumulation, aggrandisement, posi- 
tion, elevation ; when, if for one day he were 
enamoured of goodness, these things would 
seem to him so empty that he would feel as if 
he had been walking in the midst of shadows, 
and living to no purpose whatever. 

Finally, there is the adoration of what ought 
to be in perfect character. The Unitarian 
churches are not allowed by their code of 
what is right to boast of perfection. We 
know that we are not perfect. But between 
boasting of " sanctification," " perfection," 
speaking of the Infinite Being as though He 
were somebody that lived around the corner, 
in the most irrelevant and irreverent way, — 
between that and the struggle to be good, the 
adoration of character, there is all the stretch 
of celestial diameters. And the business of 
religion is the formation of character. The 
people who find this difficult come to us and 
say: "When you speak of being saved by 
character, are you not arrogating to yourselves 
righteousness?" Our answer is very sim- 
ple. We do not know of any righteousness 
except our own. If there be any righteous- 
ness that I can have "imputed" to me, it will 
not be mine, any more than somebody's else 



One World at a Time 



costume would be mine if I appeared in it. 
If I may have a righteousness that is not 
mine, there must be some means of communi- 
cation between my soul and God to make it 
mine. The fact is, there is only one kind of 
righteousness that a man can know, — the 
kind that to him is ideal ; he sees it in another 
and he strives for it himself. That is the 
whole problem of life. There is no system of 
atonement ; no attributing to me of the vir- 
tues of another ; no saving of my soul by any 
process that is outside myself that can possibly 
be effective. Would you save your soul by 
some process of theological insurance ? If 
you are saved, your soul will do the saving. 
In other words, you will come up by soul-force 
into the life, whatever it is, that belongs to 
the Great Father — the life that is in reserve 
for us ; you will come up into it as the seed 
comes up into the summer, because it has the 
power of fertility and life in itself. 

The problem of saving the soul is to have 
a soul that is worth saving. Now, no man 
can say that of himself in any arrogant 
way ; but, after all, it is the thing we be- 
lieve concerning those whom we feel have 
been brought out of death into life, out of 
trouble into victory, out of temptation into 



" A Difficult Religion " 195 



achievement : that they were there by virtue 
of a faculty in them which could not be killed 
nor set aside. If you are ever saved, your soul 
will be the instrument of your salvation. No 
miner ever carries out his work in the vein 
where he does not expect to find ore. It is 
the real, essential value of human life that it 
cannot perish without affecting the life of 
God. 

Unitarianism is an exacting faith. There 
are apt to be in all our churches people who, 
because they are affronted by Orthodoxy, 
think they are Unitarians ; because they have 
found it impossible to believe the old state- 
ment, say, "We are Unitarians." The idea 
is very common that, because you can swear 
at a thing in which you do not believe, you 
have sworn to a thing in which you have 
come to believe. Mere revolt, mere angry 
denunciation, mere protest, is not religion. 
It is only a convulsion of the mind. When 
you get over your convulsion, and conditions 
of health set in, you are ready to be brought 
out to a larger and better faith. 

We must allow for these people who are 
clinging to a raft because they have escaped 
from the wreck — which is a very natural atti- 
tude ; if the ship has gone to pieces and you 



196 One World at a Time 



are in the sea, you naturally cling to the thing 
that is afloat ; it may be a bit of timber, or it 
may be a life-raft ; but after we have allowed 
for this flotsam and jetsam of the theological 
world, we come to those who are struggling, 
with devotion to the truth, the adoration of 
goodness, the endeavour for character that is 
safe because it is sound. What is the exaction 
upon them ? There are just three particulars. 
The first is that religion is an experience and 
not a theory. It is a conscious, deliberate, 
constant realisation of communion between 
the soul and God. If that were not known by 
thousands upon thousands in all the churches, 
then the Church would have ceased to be effect- 
ive, and the ministry would have come to be 
the mere show of a profession. That is the 
first exaction that Unitarianism lays upon 
the soul, because it has no artificial helps for 
the soul. It does not furnish emotional 
gatherings, in which, by excitation of the 
emotions, the religious life is made to seem 
possible for the moment. It does not have an 
elaborated liturgy with its services. It makes 
its own service in each instance. If it rises to 
power and efficiency, that is because the peo- 
ple engaged in it have power. There are few 
helps in Unitarianism of an external kind. 



A Difficult Religion " 197 



We do not believe that man is lame, so we do 
not furnish crutches. We do not believe that 
man is sick, so we do not prescribe nostrums. 
We do not believe he is lost, so we do not 
propose for him salvation from hell. None of 
the pictorial conditions are with us that are 
furnished by other churches. We are saved 
much time and much endeavour, and get down 
to the central fact in all religion, under all 
names, namely : Can the soul know God, and 
does it know when God speaks to it ? And 
that is the thing for which you and I are to 
struggle from first to last ; and if we do not 
realise it in some sense, we have not touched 
the border of the religious life. 

The second difficulty arises from the fact that 
we have focused responsibility upon man. We 
stand by the order of Nature — and Nature 
does not allow us to put our sins on anybody 
else. You charge your sickness to the drainage ; 
but you have to take your own medicine — 
you do not pour it down the drain. You say, 
" I was hurt by a blunder of the motorman." 
Very well ; but it is not the motorman's legs 
that are put in splints. The whole system of 
thought with us is that you have got to focus 
responsibility well in the foreground of your 
life. We do our own book-keeping, and 



One World at a Time 



balance our debit and credit as the days go by. 
The system that relieves man of responsibil- 
ity, defrauds him of moral power. There is 
a vulgar proverb in the Old Testament in 
which Jehovah is represented as saying, "Ye 
shall no more say, The fathers have eaten 
sour grapes and the children's teeth are set on 
edge. I say unto you that all souls are mine. 
As the soul of the father, so the soul of the 
son is mine, and the soul that sinneth it shall 
die." That is the teaching, not of the Old 
Testament alone, but of the New. Did Jesus 
deal gently and suavely with life ? No ; he 
dealt with life as a surgeon. He said, "Why 
beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother's 
eye. but considerest not the beam that is in 
thine own eye?" He dealt with things as 
they were, and built from the ground up. The 
whole business of life is to get your respons- 
ibility so near home that you can attend to it. 

The Unitarian faith is difficult because it in- 
sists that you shall look out for the other man. 
There is not room in it for selfishness, and a 
selfish Unitarian is no Unitarian at all. If you 
are intent on your own condition, your own 
affairs, you may go somewhere else and attend 
to them. There is no room for anybody 
who is self-centered and focused on his own 



A Difficult Religion" 199 



affairs ; there is no room in life, in nature, 
where everything is related and nothing stands 
alone, — there is no room for the man who is 
only taken up with himself. " Thou shalt love 
the other as thyself," is not new with us. It 
falls from the lips of Christ, and we believe, as 
one of the fathers of the Church well said : 
" Man first ; then God." And I doubt whether 
any human being ever knows God in any sav- 
ing and powerful way who has not known 
man in some intimate and sympathetic way. 

These are some of the exactions ; and when 
men say that we are difficult, they lose sight of 
the fact that thousands of people have found 
it not too difficult to live the sublime and 
radiant faith that they believe. Indeed, it is 
true of all life, that the radiance and joy of our 
inner experience is in the very ratio in which 
we entertain high ideals. The human soul 
that in a large, strong, intimate, and real way 
deals with things as they are, because the soul 
is struggling toward God, finds its heaven here, 
and its divine communion lasting. 



CHAPTER IX 



" PULLING DOWN AND BUILDING UP" 

SOMETIMES it is said that Unitarian ism 
is a religion of denial ; sometimes that it 
is a religion of negation ; sometimes that it is 
entirely occupied with the critical faculty. But 
I have stated the objection in its simplest and 
most understandable form, namely, the con- 
stantly recurring criticism that Unitarianism 
pulls down but does not build up. There could 
not be anything more untrue ; but that is not an 
answer ; that is a protest. If this criticism 
were true, then Unitarianism ought to go out 
of business. If it were only partially true, it 
would be a serious arraignment of its useful- 
ness. But since it is absolutely untrue to the 
last degree as touching anything that ought 
not to be pulled down, my answer may meet, 
in several particulars, I hope, the criticism that 
it is a religion that pulls down but does not 
build up. 

What do the critics mean who say this? 

200 



" Pulling Down and Building Up " 201 



They mean that Unitarianism has encouraged 
free inquiry ; and this, to one who wishes to 
wall himself up in dreams, or immure himself 
in theories, or hedge himself by traditions, or 
embark upon a raft that never goes anywhere, 
but is in perpetual oscillation on the high sea 
of mind, is a horror and a distress. There are 
people who are perfectly willing to anchor to a 
floating bog, and when they think they have 
made progress, it has only been because their 
anchorage has shifted ; they have not gone 
anywhere by intention. There are people who 
are entirely satisfied to regard the anchor as 
the entire equipment of a ship, making no pro- 
vision for sails, or steam, or cordage, or even a 
binnacle-light, to say nothing of chart and 
helmsman, and all the splendid equipment of 
the voyage of mind and the adventure of the 
spirit. These are the people who discount 
free inquiry. These are the people who have 
forgotten that it was a Church Father — St. 
Hilary — who said, "If offence come with the 
truth, then better the offence than that the 
truth should be concealed." What this class 
of critics has forgotten would make a library ; 
and what they have not known would equip a 
great university with material of literature and 
knowledge. What shall the human mind — 



202 One World at a Time 



the thinking machine of the world — do but 
think, inquire, put a premium upon investiga- 
tion, lay bare by the scalpel the tissues of the 
thing inquired into, subject to the close 
scrutiny of the microscope every great thought 
nature has to reveal, and point the tube of 
their far-reaching inquiry by the telescope into 
the stellar spaces, to find God still at work ? 

But if anybody is afraid to have his mind act, 
and does not like to carry his personal sover- 
eignty under the crown of his own hat, and wants 
to have what the mercantile classes call " ready- 
to-wear " opinions ; why, then, to such people, 
Unitarianism in the process of free inquiry, 
seems to be pulling down and not building up. 
And yet, these very people, if they are devot- 
ees of art, would have stood rejoicing when 
the wall of the church was ripped open that the 
Venus of the Capitol might be rescued from 
its immured condition. The monks walled up 
the chaste figure, because they were afraid of 
their own emotions ; and a later age ripped 
open the sacred structure that it might recover 
an ancient work of art ; and it did well. But 
these who, for the sake of aesthetic beauty and 
the history of art, would have countenanced 
such a sacrilege as that, when the human mind 
is intent upon discovering the beauty of life in 



" Pulling Down and Building Up " 203 



terms of power, seek at once an anaesthetic, an 
opiate, something that will act as a sedative 
upon inquiry, and they shy at the word " scep- 
tic," forgetting that it was Jesus himself who 
said to Thomas : " Reach hither thy finger and 
see my hands ; and reach hither thy hand and 
thrust it into my side ; and be not faithless, but 
believing." This was what the Master of the 
art of living said to the sceptic among the 
disciples. 

This criticism that Unitarianism pulls down 
and does not build up, arises also from the 
fact that Unitarianism has set personal re- 
ligion over against authority. There is not a 
member of the Society of Friends believing 
in the " inner light" — there is no Methodist 
intent upon the revival of religion in the 
terms of the ministry of the Holy Spirit, — 
there is no lay churchman of the Protestant 
Episcopal Church, busy with evangelical asser- 
tion of the rights of the human soul as against 
ritual, — there is no Catholic mystic dreaming 
of communion even upon terms so carnal as 
those that appear in the words of Mary of the In- 
carnation, whose "marriage to Christ" affronts 
our taste, — there is not one of these who be- 
lieves more profoundly that religion is not a 
theory, but an experience, than do those 



204 One World at a Time 



Unitarians that are worth naming in this con- 
nection. Religion is not a theory ; it is an 
experience. Its definitions are theoretical ; 
but men do not live in definition. Men fight 
over definitions ; they grow rabid about defini- 
tions ; they are contentious over definitions ; 
we range all the way from mild protest to 
violence and bloodshed over definitions. And 
the only corrective to that insanity is the com- 
mon experience of divine realities. Men un- 
derstand one another who speak the language 
of the spirit, who never could understand each 
other when speaking the language of speculat- 
ive theology. Men understand one another 
who can pray together ; just as men with the 
blazon of the cross before them marched from 
every part of Europe, speaking every language 
of the Western world, to rescue the sepulchre of 
Christ, because they were inflamed by one 
common purpose that to them was the experi- 
ence of a great emotion ; and they fulfilled the 
splendid phrase of one of the fathers of the 
Church, who speaks of " the expulsive power of 
a great affection." 

There is only one kind of way to love purely 
and strongly in the world. There is any quan- 
tity of diversities in the theory of what love is 
like ; how love is provoked ; what course love 



" Pulling Down and Building Up " 205 



may take ; what are the physiological and psy- 
chological elements that enter into affection ; 
how far it is based in brute instinct, and how 
far it is the result of celestial visitation. All 
this, that might be extended to a programme 
of infinite absurdity, has to do with the defini- 
tion ; and the world goes on loving in its old, 
plain, splendid, regenerative way as the genera- 
tions go by. Religion is an experience of 
divine realities. It is not to be had by au- 
thority, because no human experience can be 
transplanted from one human soul to another. 
It grows in every case from the seed, and the 
seed is harrowed in by the necessities of the 
spiritual nature, and free inquiry and personal 
obligation are necessary to the mellowing of 
the soul that it may be sowed with the seed of 
a real experience. Now, if anybody is satis- 
fied with authority, then that is the kind of 
thing he wants, and he is of no concern to 
this discussion. If anybody must have author- 
ity that runs back at least fifteen hundred years, 
he should go, as I have said, into the Roman 
Catholic Church. It is not the genuine thing. 
It is the first great schism in Christianity, 
but it has its fifteen hundred years. Let him 
go there if he must have authority ; that is, 
if anybody is so constructed that he must 



2o6 One World at a Time 



have crutches when he is not lame, then the 
Catholic Church furnishes the most admirable 
adaptation of fictitious supports for beings 
that have legs. But that is not a substitute 
for personal religion. A woman who has been 
in one of the great churches comes to me 
and says : " When I came face to face with 
the death of the person whom I loved best 
in all the world, I wanted to know for my- 
self what w r ere the issues of life and death." 
And that, every minister of religion confronts 
over and over again. For calm weather, when 
indifference is quite a sufficient equipment for 
the soul, authority is quite comfortable, just as 
securities are well placed in some bank of safe 
deposit ; but when you want to use the thing 
you own as quick assets at a crisis, you must 
know whether it is negotiable in the market. 
That is the whole situation. That is the 
whole question : Whether I can take another 
man's opinion for a thing that is tearing the 
soul out of me. Whether I can take an- 
other man's discovery for my consolation when 
I am lost, and whether a chart that was made 
in the seventeenth century is good sailing 
directions for a voyage made in the twentieth 
century. Because Unitarianism has insisted 
upon personal religion as an experience, it is 



" Pulling Down and Building Up " 207 



said that it pulls down and does not build up. 

Another reason that affects the people who 
are influenced by numbers : There is always a 
large contingent in the world who never believe 
that anything is so unless somebody is shout- 
ing about it, and unless a great many people 
are endorsing it. A thing is true in the 
ratio of its popularity; and Unitarianism has 
not set itself to make proselytes nor to build 
churches except as incidental to the great work 
of building character. So it is asked : " Why 
is it that you have less than five hundred 
churches in America ? " There is no answer 
to that, except that building churches would 
possibly have diverted us from the great task 
of building a literature, which we have done. 
Every man of the first rank in the literary 
group of the last generation, with one or two 
exceptions, was a member, avowed and devoted, 
of a Unitarian Church. This is not a boast ; it 
is a fact. They did not apologise for it. Why 
should I apologise for them ? I simply state 
the fact, that the great names, which I will not 
take time to rehearse, with the exception of 
Washington Irving and one other, were Unit- 
arians. They were busy with the production of 
what has been the companionableness of liter- 
ature in this country, and which was supposed 



2o8 One World at a Time 



to constitute a literature until Mr. Barrett Wen- 
dell wrote his book a few months ago. 

Unitarians are reproached with not being 
many. Well, that is not their method. That 
is not the method of sane government in matters 
secular. We believe in a democracy ; but we 
commit the administration of it to a few. We 
believe in the ideal of free trade, but we see to it 
that protection lasts until free trade is possible. 
We believe in the absolute right of all men to 
have whatever they can hold ; but, after all, if 
you should divide all the wealth to-day, in ten 
years it would be back in the hands of those 
who could hold it. So that we are not to 
blame for not multiplying churches. We have 
been building schools. We have been endow- 
ing universities. We have been creating a 
literature, and we have been trying to build 
up character. And numbers are not the test 
of truth in any instance. If that were so, then 
Christianity must go by the board, for the vast 
majority of the human race do not profess it. 
There are four hundred millions of Buddhists 
who repudiate it with absolute ease and de- 
light ; but that does not invalidate its truth to 
anyone who believes in its efficiency as a rule 
of life. 

These characteristics that I have named : 



" Pulling Down and Building Up " 209 



the right to free inquiry — free inquiry as a 
duty, personal religion as an experience, and 
the absence of nervous anxiety to add to the 
statistics of our ecclesiastical history, make us 
seem, to those who criticise, people who are 
not concerned to build up. 

What are the facts? The facts are that 
Unitarianism builds up personal responsibility, 
while it emphasises personal liberty. Now, 
there are Unitarians and Unitarians. There 
are people who have been born into the Unit- 
arian churches, who have never given religion 
any serious thought since. I do not know what 
their state is. Their opinions are not worth 
anything. The fact that they were born under 
given conditions does not entitle them to be 
heard. Only the student of a subject is fit to 
speak upon it. He may be mistaken even 
then ; but at least he has given the matter at- 
tention ; he has focused his mind upon it. I 
do not claim that all Unitarians are saints, 
though I have known a vast number who, 
tested by character in its robuster elements, 
were so pre-eminently good, that if they had 
given me their opinions in a language I could 
not understand, and when it was interpreted 
to me would have been found to be a doctrine 

of which I had never heard, I should still have 
14 



2IO 



One World at a Time 



been compelled to make the appeal back to 
the rectitude of their lives and the beauty of 
their character, and say : " That is the vindica- 
tion of what I fail to understand in terms of 
speech." I have been with people of our faith 
in dying, in disaster, and in prosperity, in their 
delights of common life and in the sadder ex- 
periences of our common history ; and I say, 
not simply as John Wesley did of the early 
Methodists, " Our people die well," but that 
these have lived so well I cannot think of them 
as dead. 

In the building up of personal responsibil- 
ity and personal liberty, we have necessarily 
pulled down the traditions. There are people 
for whom the New Testament was bound in 
heaven and let down to mortals, to put it 
very plainly ; and they require you to believe 
every line of it or else be charged with 
destroying it. Now, the business of every de- 
vout, inquiring mind is to open it up ; and 
what seems to the worm that has been hatched 
down at the heart of a rose, when the rose 
unfolds and the light comes into it, — what 
seems to the grub a pulling down, because the 
petals open out to the sun and its poor little 
squirminess is exposed to the light, to the 
rose seems the fulfilling of its destiny, and, to 



" Pulling Down and Building Up " 211 



the gardener who discovers the worm, his op- 
portunity. The business of the inquiring mind 
is to open up the Scripture ; and the fact 
that Unitarianism devoted itself to the Higher 
Criticism, keeping up with it at every advance, 
has resulted for us in restoring the New 
Testament to the use of thinking minds, in- 
stead of having it repudiated by those who 
found parts of it impossible to believe. I 
will give an illustration : Take the story of 
Jesus cursing the fig-tree. If that were true, 
I should have to let the character of Jesus go. 
Nothing he could do after that would restore 
it to me. To have cursed the fig-tree and 
withered it, even if it were given to any being 
to do that thing, because it had no figs on 
it when he was hungry, would have forever 
deposed him from the leadership of men. 
No creature can claim to lead or save who 
is kindled to ignoble anger by personal dis- 
appointment. I have no trouble in saying it 
never happened. It is the business of people 
who think for themselves to say that. When 
I find in the New Testament that only in 
the preface to Luke's Gospel and the preface 
to Matthew's Gospel is the abnormal birth of 
Jesus of Nazareth referred to, — and that it is 
not known to Paul, who writes the earliest 



2i2 One World at a Time 



documents in the New Testament record, — I 
am obliged to make a distinction between the 
divine character and the miraculous birth. 
When you do that, for these people who say you 
must take it all or leave it all, though they do 
not do that with any other literature in the world, 
though they do not do that with any day's diet at 
the table, though they do not do that even with 
the characters of their own friends, — this pro- 
cess of inquiry, of personal responsibility and 
personal liberty, seems to be pulling down and 
not building up. I will venture the statement 
that but for the work which began with Semler 
in 1 790, that has been known during our lifetime 
as the Higher Criticism of the Scripture, the 
Bible would have ceased to be read, as a book 
of impossible miracles and unworkable ethics. 
It is because students have discriminated be- 
tween what was the word of God to the 
human soul in a progressive revelation, and 
what were the accidents of literature in a 
moving procession of the centuries, that the 
Bible is prized to-day as never before by 
thinking men. 

Still further. Unitarianism not only insists 
upon this personal liberty and constant revela- 
tion, so that God speaks now as He always 
has spoken to the listening mind, but it insists 



" Pulling Down and Building Up " 213 

upon a personal responsibility which requires 
no atonement outside the soul itself. Now, 
a shudder passes over the evangelical mind 
when you say that. They say you have 
denied the Atonement. You cannot deny a 
thing that never happened. You can only 
deny the statement that it did happen. I 
said in the beginning what I repeat now. — 
we have never pulled down a single essential 
element that went to the making of human 
character, or to the vindication of the truths of 
history, or to the affirmation of the facts that 
lie in the Ultimate Reality of things. All 
that we have insisted is, that you shall not 
write out a new code with every generation, 
and declare that unless a man believes that, he 
is to be consigned to condemnation now and 
eternally lost. This difficulty is illustrated 
by what happens in the Church of England. 
The Athanasian Creed is recited. When 
they have recited the Athanasian Creed, 
which belongs to the eighth century, they 
have consigned themselves to eternal con- 
demnation for having previously recited the 
Nicene Creed. There they stand — in the 
same book, recited in the same church, and 
you have your choice on which terms you will 
go to hell. We insist that that is inconsistent 



214 



One World at a Time 



with personal responsibility, inconsistent with 
salvation which is sanative. Salvation is 
moral health, and you cannot have it proceed 
outside the individual soul. All the thought 
of the ages may be spent in providing the 
instruments of salvation, but only the struggle 
of soul can make that salvation a personal 
experience. 

Finally. What I have intimated must still 
further be enforced, namely, that the test of 
religion is in the character it produces. One 
of the most entertaining and exasperating 
things in public discussion is that your an- 
tagonist will continually try to run you on 
a siding ; so that when you say that the test of 
religion is in the character that it produces, the 
critic immediately responds, " Do you pretend 
to say that the orthodox faiths do not pro- 
duce good character?" That is what they 
say every time, you can count upon it with 
absolute certainty. No, that is not meant. 
What I say is this : That the test of a religion 
is in the character it produces by virtue of 
that which the soul got out of it ; and it is not 
the test of a religion as to the character it pro- 
duces by what the soul carefully excludes and 
forgets that it teaches. That is the situation 
of our evangelical friends. Mr. Beecher used 



" Pulling Down and Building Up " 215 



to say, twenty years ago and more, that he be- 
lieved there was a creed in the church safe, — 
a Confession of Faith, — but, having lost the 
combination, he preached what he pleased, and 
people were not interested in distinctions of 
theology ; they believed profoundly, what they 
heard, to the very great benefit of their souls. 
Now, when a commercial theory of the Atone- 
ment, which makes God buy back children He 
never lost, and puts the sacrifice of their sins 
upon a being who never committed them, in 
order that they may escape a hell which He 
made, and be relieved of the temptations of a 
demon who could not have grown up with 
God, — I say, when that theory of the Atone- 
ment is proposed to a human mind, under 
conditions evangelical, and good character 
comes under those conditions, it comes in spite 
of a theory which is essentially dishonest, un- 
just, and which if it occurred in the business 
walks of life would exclude a man from the 
world of trade ; because it proposes a fictitious 
condition, to be relieved by a dishonest process. 
There is nothing sacred about the doctrine 
of the Atonement, except the sacred emotions 
which are associated with it. It is only as old 
as Anselm in the eleventh century. It was 
utterly unknown during the first years of the 



216 One World at a Time 



Christian Church. It has no place in the New 
Testament. But, because somebody insists 
upon it with determined iteration, it has be- 
come as sacred as any other idol that has often 
enough been shown to the worshippers. Now, 
I say that anybody who wins good character 
out of that, wins it in spite of that condition. 
There are many doctrines that are not ger- 
mane, that have no influence whatever upon 
character. I do not understand why a person 
should not be as devout and godly of character 
believing in the Trinity — which is a proposition 
in philosophy, and has nothing to do with re- 
ligion whatever — as under the conditions that 
we represent of the unity of God. But they 
cannot be philosophically clear. They are in 
some confusion when they pray. For even 
the most modified theory of the Trinity as 
a series of manifestations has its difficulties. 
Those are difficulties of mind, of the specul- 
ative faculty, and not difficulties of character. 
I insist, that the test of a religion is to be 
found in the character it produces by virtue 
of what is believed. The Fatherhood of God, 
infinitely fatherly ; the sense of communion 
that nothing can interrupt ; the experience of 
heaven here and now ; the consciousness of 
the forgiveness of sins, which has been pro- 



" Pulling Down and Building Up " 217 

vided for between the soul and God, with no 
mediator between, — these are elements that 
are easily transmuted into character, for their 
very essence involves the sense of personal 
responsibility. 



CHAPTER X 



WHAT HAS BEEN BUILT UP 
ertain things have been built up. In the 



first place, the faith we contend for has 
built up the courage of those who hold it. 
If I were asked to name any one thing that is 
most saving to human life, I should say cour- 
age. A discouraged man puts the enervation 
of his own nature into his work, he puts the 
dulness of his own spirit into his work. His 
eye is dull. The work of God cannot be 
seen with eyes as dull as those of a stale fish. 
The eye must be purged of all film, all ob- 
scurity, and the heart must be true to every 
motion of the spirit's intention. The one 
thing we need in order to get on in life is not 
simply to make the best terms that we can, 
but to compel it to the best terms that we 
need ; and the motto that I saw over the 
door of George MacDonald's house in Old 
English, " Corage : God mend all ! " is the 
motto of every soul that is imbued with 




218 



What Has Been Built Up 219 



the faith that we profess. This courage is 
based first of all on the fact that God is good, 
and God's world is a good world to be in 
with God ; that there is nothing out of which 
God can be driven ; that I cannot even by my 
sins escape Him ; and the only way I can run to 
ever outrun my sin or my sorrow is to run 
to Him. And what the child feels who is lost, 
and works its way through the labyrinth of 
streets and finally sees that it is near home, 
every soul of us feels — that we are not far from 
God and the home of the soul ; that God is 
" infinitely Fatherly " ; that " there is no place 
where earth's sorrows are more felt than 
up in Heaven " ; that the goodness of God 
is wide "like the wideness of the sea" ; and 
that therefore, instead of the old, diabolical, 
immoral, vengeful occupation of a throne out- 
side the universe by a God who watches it go, 
we have substituted in our thinking the Fath- 
erhood of God, never remote, always, as Jesus 
said, " seeking those to worship Him who 
worship Him in spirit and in truth." It is a 
great thing to dismiss the fear of God in this 
abject sense from the human soul. 

More than this. We have dismissed the 
fear of the destiny of man, as to the order of 
man's life. There are two things that disturb 



220 One World at a Time 



us. The first is, " What am I to do ? " The 
other is, " What is to become of me ?" And 
between those two affrights, all their life 
long some souls have been held in bond- 
age. What am I to do ? How can I work out 
my career ? I often find in the ministry of re- 
ligion people who are saying, "How am I to 
get on ? " What a useless question for a hu- 
man soul ! There is nothing to be done in 
this world about getting on, except to be fit to 
get on. Any human being who knows any 
one thing well that anybody else wants to 
know, has an audience and a purpose and an 
opportunity ; and any human being that can 
do anything well that anybody wants to have 
done, is sure of occupation. And so we have, 
as fundamental to our thinking, the idea 
that every man's life is a plan of God ; that 
it is part of the order of nature, if you please, 
which is just the same thing as its being the 
plan of God. For this is not an atheistic 
world ; it is not a world without God ; it is 
not a world in which any part of our work can 
be done alone. The great purpose of life is to 
do with contentment whatever the Divine Will 
appoints. It is of no concern at all what you 
do ; but the manner and style of doing it are of 
great concern. I am only concerned that it shall 



What Has Been Built Up 221 



be something that shall be creditable to my 
Maker. I am more concerned, as every loyal 
subject of a king must be, that it shall be to the 
honour of the king than that it shall be felicit- 
ous or comfortable or favourable to the sub- 
ject. The honour of the Maker is in the 
hands of His creatures ; and the dreadful 
thing about sin is not simply that it is sin- 
ful, not at all that it shall be punished, — it 
ought to be, and no noble man who sins, even 
by mistake or indirection, would wish to 
escape his punishment, or have anybody else 
pay his debt, — the dreadful thing about sin is 
that a being who was made in the image of 
God, and into whose keeping God put His 
work and His will, should be disloyal — the 
worst word in the language. He can never 
come to the " Land o' the Leal," because he 
is a traitor to the very conditions of his birth 
and being. That is the fearful thing about 
sin, that the thing God made is a standing 
reproach to his Maker. Destiny is taken out of 
the realm of fear and put into the keeping 
of God ; and this building up of the courage 
of life is one of the things we have done for 
those who accept our faith. 

We have done another thing. With no in- 
vidious purpose whatever, I must still insist 



222 



One World at a Time 



upon the fact that the other churches have 
been trying to make a nice adjustment be- 
tween the things they thought were true and 
the things that the scientific inquiry of the 
world has proved to be true. While the 
churches have been trying to see how little 
they could allow to the natural world and to 
scientific and philosophic inquiry, the Unitar- 
ian ministry and laity have been united in one 
single inquiry, — "Is it true?" Proven true, 
it becomes part of our gospel. Demonstrated 
true, though it reverse all our opinions, we 
must accept it, because there cannot be two 
antagonistic truths in God's world. What is 
theologically true must be true in the scientific 
sense as well. There cannot be a true world 
and a false theology which can be made to 
agree. We are pledged to the advance of sci- 
ence. We do not say that the doctrine of evo- 
lution has been finally proven ; but it is to-day 
the working hypothesis of the whole scientific 
world, and it is our working hypothesis as ap- 
plied to theology, to the Bible, to human life ; 
that is, we examine a text of Scripture by the 
scientific method, just as you would examine 
the specific gravity of a metal, or would apply 
a physiological test or a chemical test, or 
test by the microscope or telescope. When 



What Has Been Built Up 223 



we employ the scientific process we mean that 
things are tested by a procession of thought 
from the fact to the conclusion, not from a 
supposition back to the fact. The scientific 
method is applied in religion. The scientific 
method is the only safe method to apply. So 
we have welcomed science. I do not believe 
there has been a man of us, in all these one hun- 
dred years that have gone by, that has written a 
single book or preached a single sermon or said 
a single word to reconcile science to religion. 
We have been reconciling theology to the 
facts of the universe, because theology is only 
the more or less scientific statement of our 
conclusions concerning facts. Every man 
stands fronting two sets of phenomena in the 
world : one set, the phenomena of the mate- 
rial universe ; the other, the phenomena of the 
spiritual universe. Why should he suppose 
for a moment that he can adjust himself to the 
material universe in terms consistent with his 
well-being as a creature without also, by the 
same endeavour and purpose, adjusting himself 
to the spiritual universe as a child of God ? 
The two things go together, and the separa- 
tion of them has been the reproach of the 
churches. Take any group assembled to dis- 
cuss the revision of a Confession of Faith. 



224 



One World at a Time 



With the best intentions in the world, with ab- 
solute sincerity, with all the honour of the 
Church in their keeping, why should there be 
any question among them as to an ancient 
document, if it can be stated in terms level to 
the facts of modern life ? I believe in the con- 
tinuity of Christian thought, and these ancient 
formulae are part of the history of the ecclesi- 
astical development of the world ; but they 
have no sanctity except the sanctity which went 
into the lives that made them and the sincerity 
of purpose that produced them ; and I should 
think that a group of men of God, gathered 
together over the question as to whether they 
should revise the formulae of religion in the 
terms of modern thought and the necessities 
of the modern mind, would aspire to just one 
thing, and that is, to be for their generation as 
sincere as the people that made the formulae 
they are investigating ; and if they were as sin- 
cere as that they would give us a different thing. 
The absolute sincerity of the Fathers is unques- 
tioned. The absolute sincerity of the Consti- 
tutional Convention of 1787 is unquestioned ; 
but that did not hinder the passage of the Fif- 
teenth Amendment to the Constitution, that 
gave four millions of slaves their rights as 
citizens. And yet there were people in the 



What Has Been Built Up 225 



days following the Civil War who talked about 
the invasion of the Constitution, as though it 
were to be thought of in the same moment 
with the invasion of human rights ! When 
you erect a document into a fetich, you are 
simply in a retarded state of spiritual develop- 
ment ; between the lower orders of civilisation, 
with a fetich or an amulet or a totem, there is 
not much to choose as compared with those 
who take a document or a statement which, in 
its day, was a very Ark of the Covenant to sin- 
cere souls, and who say : " For all time this is 
to abide. The human mind has learned many 
a thing, but concerning these things it has 
stood absolutely still." That is an inconceiv- 
able state of mind to us ; and, whilst we always 
assume the sincerity of those who hold it, we 
lament the loss of time and spiritual power. 

We have also built up, not only this courage 
of the human race, as far as they have heard 
and believed our word, we not only hold this 
open-minded attitude toward the progress of 
the human mind, but we have insisted upon 
the dignity of human nature. When Dr. 
Channing, in 18 19, in Baltimore, set the dignity 
of human nature over against the total de- 
pravity of man, challenging the doctrine of 
total depravity of the race by the doctrine of 



226 



One World at a Time 



the dignity and divinity of human nature, it 
was as notable as any Declaration of Independ- 
ence ever penned ; for it was the statement 
that God had not made a thing of which He 
need be ashamed. Now of the doctrine of 
total depravity you say, " Nobody believes it." 
Well, perhaps not, for himself. I have never 
met a man who thought he was totally de- 
praved. I have seen some people who gave 
ample signs of it to the external ohserver, — 
abnormal specimens, distorted and morbid de- 
velopments, — but those we relegate at once to 
the field of imperfect development or misdi- 
rected development. So I suppose that no 
one for himself or for anybody he loved ever 
believed in total depravity. And we insist 
that the field of the world cannot be planted 
with seed that is rotten to the core. Farmers 
are beginning to put their seed into the ground 
and to get ready their gardens for the summer, 
and they are throwing out of the heap of their 
seed potatoes every one that is rotten to the 
core. You cannot grow a crop of any kind — 
men, or any other crop — out of stuff that is 
totally depraved. And when the Church de- 
clared its belief in total depravity, and then 
started to live up to its faith in total depravity, 
it reproached God and entered upon a dis- 



What Has Been Built Up 227 



pensation of despair. And here was the ter- 
rible thing that happened : they began to 
think meanly of God, because they thought so 
meanly of man. The rescue of the character 
of God has to be achieved in the terms of the 
dignity of man. A Being that made man so 
that He could not save him, or must enter into 
an immoral contract to save him, which all 
theories of the Atonement in some aspect are 
liable to involve, — the Being who is thus limited 
has lost more from His own character in the 
minds of His worshippers, than man has lost of 
character by the formulated statement of his 
depravity. We have insisted upon the dignity 
of human nature, — that we are children of the 
great God and we belong to Him ; that He 
cannot get rid of us; that He brought us into 
being and is accountable for us ; that our 
business is to grow into His image and be like 
Him ; that moral health is salvation ; and to 
conform to the image of His son, to the like- 
ness of his moral qualities, — this constitutes 
the Atonement. And this conviction we have 
built up in spite of every effort to the con- 
trary ; so that in all the churches to-day, the 
doctrine of a cureless hell, of an inextinguish- 
able retribution, has disappeared, except in very 
remote districts and very uninformed minds. 



228 One World at a Time 



The Universalist Church was built upon the 
protest against the doctrine of irremediable 
ruin. The Unitarians took the other side of 
the same proposition, and claimed that the 
character of God forbade the ruin of man ; so 
that when Charles Carroll Everett uttered the 
phrase which has passed into a commonplace 
in our thinking, that "Human nature is not 
ruined, but incomplete," it carried immediate 
conviction. Is it not evident that on that 
basis we are ready to begin any work and 
do anything for the betterment of our kind ? 
But if humanity be totally depraved, then 
the sooner it is snuffed out the better. You 
cannot keep an unremedied and contagious 
disease in contact with the race without hurt- 
ing it ; and if that be the condition of God's 
creatures, there is no remedy that we know 
except extinction ; that would make it safe for 
the Elect ; and that was the doctrine of pre- 
destination reduced to its crudest form ; — if 
that be true, then I want to go with the other 
folk. I have been spending the thirty years 
of my ministry trying to look out for the 
"under dog" in the fight, for the man who 
was not quite up to the mark, and for the 
man who needed help and teaching ; and if 
God has just a few who are to be saved, 



What Has Been Built Up 229 



then I would wish to go with the crowd. 
But we do not have to come to that conclu- 
sion. The dignity of human nature is shown 
in every aspect of human life. In the ministry 
of the last thirty years, surprises as to the 
dignity of human nature have come upon me 
again and again ; from the most unexpected 
sources the beauty of human life has appeared, 
as when one stands surprised at the radiant 
beauty of a cactus-bloom that grows out of the 
thorny plant. The dignity and divinity of hu- 
man nature we insist upon ; and it were better 
to have human nature divine in character and 
no God in the universe ; the ideals which it fol- 
lows true, and no God to match them, if that 
philosophic proposition were possible, than 
to have a Being of whom it could be said, as 
Browning wrote : 

" The loving worm within his clod 
Were diviner than a loveless God 
Within his worlds." 

We are as much concerned with saving the 
character of God as with glorifying and digni- 
fying the nature of man. 

The Unitarian faith has built up another 
thing, the truth of Inspiration from God ; and 
thus it has built up not itself alone, but has 
joined the great company of those who are 



230 



One World at a Time 



building up a confidence in the revelation 
of God's Word. We do not restrict it to 
the Bible of the Old and New Testament. 
There are world-scriptures. The great eth- 
nic scriptures of the world are to be con- 
sulted. In my own judgment as a student, 
they are not to be compared in richness 
and power with the ethical passion of the 
Hebrew Scriptures and the Christian Script- 
ures. But they are deliverances of God to 
the Hindu, to the Mohammedan, to the 
Zoroastrian, and the great company of those 
of whom it is said, "He hath made of one 
blood all the nations of the earth ; that they 
should seek God, if haply they might feel 
after him and find him, though he is not far 
from each one of us." We have declared for 
that study of the Scripture, that " Higher Crit- 
icism," which has practically restored the study 
of the Bible to the intelligent mind of man 
and has made it possible for him to inquire, 
not for the infallible Word of God, as you 
would go to a book of infallible statutes ; but 
as to what God said in the ancient time to 
His children ; he is thus encouraged to wait 
and listen for what God shall say to him. 
And that is the doctrine of the New Testa- 
ment. In the Epistle to the Hebrews we read : 



What Has Been Built Up 231 



" God, having of old time spoken unto the 
fathers in the prophets by divers portions and 
in divers manners, hath at the end of these 
days spoken unto us in his Son." And this 
element of devotion to the life of Christ as 
the revealer in terms of humanhood of the 
life of God, is pre-eminent amongst us. 

Finally. We have built up character and 
practical achievement. It would be a stupid 
man or woman who would turn from these 
pages and say that I declared that there was 
no character formed by the other faiths. That 
needs no answer ; it is simply not true. What 
I say is that the character that is formed in 
spite of these beliefs is formed under diffi- 
culties that we whose character is formed be- 
cause of our beliefs, do not have to encounter. 
If I have to love God in spite of a cureless 
hell, I am in a very different position intel- 
lectually and morally from loving God because 
of an unfathomable mercy. If I have to 
follow Jesus of Nazareth as a composite being 
made up of God and man in terms I cannot 
define, whose human nature presents no valid- 
ity for me, because it is a human nature I do 
not possess, and whose divine inspiration pre- 
sents no validity to me, because it is different 
from anything that I can have, — then my 



232 One World at a Time 



attitude toward him as the leader and helper 
of my life must be entirely different from 
what it is now, when the processes we call di- 
vine are translated in terms of an absolute 
humanhood, simple humanity, pure humanity, 
daily living as a means of learning the Beat- 
itudes. So that when I say we build up 
character, I mean to say this : that we do not 
ask a human being to go through the con- 
vulsions of some fictitious repentance for sins 
he never committed and lay claim upon an 
atonement which can only save if the field 
of its operation is in another mind and not 
in his own, and then to be adopted into the 
family of God, whose child he always was, 
and to have a hope of Heaven based upon 
a work done for him by the Saviour of the 
world, and to think that part of his joy there 
will be in seeing the sufferings of the damned. 
If that is my attitude, then any character I 
get in that process I get in spite of it ; and 
it is a tribute to the essential soundness of 
human nature that such beautiful character, 
such glorified character is possible to those 
who believe all those things. There is some- 
thing in human nature that you cannot kill 
by theologic statement. There is something 
in human nature that resists the poison of 



What Has Been Built Up 233 



vicious suggestion, just as there is something 
in every man and woman that leads him and 
her to go through a vicious world untouched 
by its sin and uncorrupted by its influence. 
We build up character in the terms of the 
Fatherhood of God and of the dignity of 
human nature and by the direct approach 
of the soul to God, unmediated and alone, and 
this we call practical religion. 



CHAPTER XI 
HOW CAN RELIGION BE TAUGHT? 

SOME confusion must necessarily arise in 
any contemplative mind when the word 
religion is pronounced ; because the religions 
are many, and religion is but one. The 
churches are many, and there has been a battle 
of the churches in order that only one may be 
left. For it would seem that there could be 
no other motive for ecclesiastical contention, 
unless it were to kill off the remainder and 
have the survival of — the one that was left ; I 
cannot say " the fittest," because the contention 
in which they were engaged was not fit for the 
Church of the living God. So some confusion 
always must appear in a contemplative mind 
when the word religion is uttered. It sees 
tribal religions which are bounded by the peri- 
phery of the tribe's own existence. It opens 
the Scripture of the Old Testament, and finds 
that Israel passed through three distinct phases 
of its sense of God. There was the time when 



234 



How Can Religion Be Taught ? 235 



Yahweh — Jehovah — was only a tribal deity. 
There was the time when he was the great 
Deity, — tribal still, but greater than all the 
rest, and subduing them unto his own rule ; 
and there was the final conception of God as 
the Lord of the whole earth. There were also 
adumbrations of what we now hold to be uni- 
versal religion ; that is, religion which, under 
all its aspects, is one in essence. As we say of 
Nature, that there is but one energy and all 
forces are but modes of its manifestation, and 
count it now an axiom to say that ; so in re- 
ligion we say there is but one religion, and all 
religions are modes of its manifestation. 

So we come to feel that a definition of re- 
ligion is necessary. We turn to the great ex- 
ponents of the root thoughts of the human 
mind, and we come upon such a definition as 
this of Goethe : " All religions have one aim, 
— to make man accept the inevitable." But 
there is no delight in that ; and if there is any 
purpose in religion, it must be to add zest to 
life by putting life into right relations, so that 
that which belongs to it shall come to it ; and 
that power of reserve shall be in it, that not only 
stoically accepts the inevitable, but splendidly 
prepares for the next stage in life's develop- 
ment. So that Goethe's definition that "All 



236 



One World at a Time 



religions have one aim, — to make man accept 
the inevitable," does not provide for develop- 
ment ; it provides only for defence ; and if I am 
simply in the attitude of defending myself 
against the gods, then I am in a very primitive 
form of religious thought. For that is one of 
its early aspects. The gods are inimical to 
human joy, and the purpose of being on terms 
with them is not to let them have their way 
with me. Therefore that cannot be a defini- 
tion of religion, for it does not provide for de- 
light and for development. 

Frederic Harrison's statement is, that " Re- 
ligion is summed up in duty." But I can have 
no duty to God. God is the source of every 
aspect of duty in me. His life would go on if I 
were utterly regardless of Him. Not so the 
life of my fellow. It does not go on unless I 
help it. Therefore, in this definition, you 
must separate religion from ethics. It is not 
summed up in duty. It is not even summed 
in love that is without duty, and it certainly 
cannot be measured by duty without love. 

Or again, with the deference that we feel to- 
ward everything that John Morley writes, we 
read this definition in his estimate of what re- 
ligion is : " By holiness do we not mean some- 
thing different from virtue ? It is not the same 



How Can Religion Be Taught? 237 



as duty. Still less is it the same as religious 
belief. It is the name of the inner grace of 
nature, an instinct of the soul, by which, though 
knowing earthly appetites and passions, the 
spirit, purifying itself by itself, and independent 
of reason, argument, and the struggles of the 
will, dwells in loving, patient, and confident 
communion with the seen and the unseen 
good." Now there is much, very much, of 
truth in that. It is beautifully stated. It is 
fine. But it is just a little too fine. For it is 
abstruse, involved, prolix, and cannot be ex- 
plained to the uneducated ; and any definition 
of religion that cannot be explained to the 
least instructed cannot be explained anywhere 
satisfactorily. The Bowery must have a de- 
finition, as well as the upper ranges of what we 
vainly and idly call " society." 

There is also this difficulty with Mr. Mor- 
ley's definition, that he says religion is in- 
dependent of reason ; whereas reason is the 
supreme court before which it is tried. If it 
is not rational, then it is not for rational be- 
ings. We can no longer say in one mood of 
Tertullian, " I believe it because it is impossi- 
ble." We say rather in the other mood of 
Tertullian, " The soul divines what is divine." 
It is said by Mr. Morley "that holiness is 



2 3 8 



One World at a Time 



independent of the struggles of the will." 
But the struggle of the will is part of holiness 
itself. It is not a temperature that comes 
upon you without sharing in the will. It is 
not a mere condition of temperament, even, 
in which the will has no part. So I think we 
must examine a little more closely as to what 
religion is before we can say how it may be 
taught. 

I call your attention, therefore, to three 
stages, briefly expressed, which must enter as 
contributory to the conception of religion at 
all. The first is the sense of dependence. 
This may be expressed as " Man and God," — 
the sense of obligation. I can have no duty 
toward God, but I have a duty from God to- 
ward the other man. The race passes from its 
childhood to its adolescence, in which, as in 
the individual, egotism is replaced by altruism, 
and the love of self is followed by the love 
of the other. When we get to the great 
" Other," who is God, the original " Other," 
the prototype, the archetypal pattern of all 
that is, then we find ourselves in a realm of 
dependence upon God as source, and the 
aspect of religion cannot be avoided that, It 
consists in a relation of dependence of man 
upon God. For instance : the man who is 



How Can Religion Be Taught ? 239 



so trivial or superficial as to say that there is 
no God ; the man who has not read much in 
the last twenty years ; who has made no in- 
telligent study of physical science ; who is not 
familiar with the natural world ; who there- 
fore has not passed that period known as 
" philosophical atheism"; that man, by the 
very struggle to be independent and alone, 
gives a negative argument for his dependence, 
by the struggle it costs him to reach his inde- 
pendent attitude. So the sense of depend- 
ence is elementary to religion ; but it makes 
no provision for an enlarged experience, and 
most of all it makes no provision for an unex- 
pected crisis, which, unless the soul be related 
to God, it is conscious of bearing alone. Our 
lives are a succession of catastrophes if we 
are alone ; they are a succession of experi- 
ences if we are bound up in the bundle of life 
with Him. To be alone would be a tragedy 
in life's catastrophes. 

There is a second condition contributory to 
religion. Not only must there be the sense 
of dependence, which may be expressed as 
" Man and God," but there must be the 
sense of relation, which may be expressed as 
" Man like God." The effort of religion grow- 
ing out of dependence is to build a bridge 



240 



One World at a Time 



between man and God, or to run a tunnel, a 
subway, under the superficial aspects of life, 
by which there is a means of communication 
between us and God. This rises at last to 
the conception that not only am I dependent 
upon God because I am helpless ; but I am 
related to God because I am like Him ; I share 
His nature. In the fourth century, Athanasius 
made a statement which was afterward hard- 
ened into dogma, instead of allowing it to 
remain fluent as poetry ; he declared that 
" The Son is not of like substance with the 
Father, but the Son is of the same substance 
with the Father " ; he had a great revelation 
of the fact that there is but one ground of 
being in the world, and that no son can ever 
be other than of the same substance with the 
father. So when Jesus says in his splendid 
phrase, " I and my Father are one," he is not 
stating a mathematical identity ; he is stating 
a moral coalescence ; he is stating just what all 
the prismatic rays are stating, divided into 
their rainbow hues through the great primordial 
colours ; suddenly the prism is taken away, and 
you stand in white light. It is optical coalesc- 
ence ; it is the coalescence of colours. " I 
and my Father are one " is the statement of a 
relation that may be expressed, whether by 



How Can Religion Be Taught? 241 

Christ or by any humblest follower of his, or 
any meditative soul that never heard of him, 
as " Man with God." That is essential to 
religion. 

The third condition contributory to religion 
is, not only dependence, or man and God ; 
not only relation, as man with God ; but a 
sense of common purpose, namely, " Man for 
God," as the instrument of His manifestation, 
as the medium in which He works. Does the 
sculptor take the clay ; does the painter take 
the pigments ; does the musician wish for his 
instrument ; does the great violin-maker say 
God could not make it without him ? So in 
every aspect of life the sense of common 
purpose is seen. " We are workers together 
with God." We are not only His husbandry, 
as Paul says ; we are not only His building ; 
we are not only the product of His creative 
power ; not only so, but He never has stopped 
creating, has never got done with what He 
was doing ; and He has left us some little 
fragments of work that we may do, so that we 
may not be idle in a world which is not yet 
done. If the universe is not yet finished, it 
behooves us to have a share in the making 
of it. Every shiver of an earthquake is test- 
imony to the cooling of a planet that has 



242 



One World at a Time 



not yet cooled enough for man's safety. We 
have our contribution to make ; and religion 
that is not " Man for God " has missed one 
essential element in it. 

The first contribution, Man and God, which 
takes the form of dependence, is expressed 
in the statement made by a woman who was 
talking to a friend a little while ago. One 
said to the other, " Why do you go to such 
a church, where the mythological aspect of 
the service certainly affronts your reason ? " 
Her friend answered : " I go there when I 
want to bite the dust ; because every con- 
dition of the service implies that God is 
everything and man nothing, — a mere insect, 
ephemeral in to-day's radiance, floating in the 
sunshine of the divine outpouring." That was 
the impression the service made upon her 
mind ; and so when she got into an abnormal 
state of continued repentance, a kind of serial 
repentance that is " continued in our next 
issue," she went to that service because she 
wanted to "bite the dust." That is primitive 
religion devising mythology to satisfy its own 
sense of dependence. 

The second contribution is found in the 
higher aspects of religion. It is found, as I 
have intimated, in the life of Christ, whose 



How Can Religion Be Taught ? 243 

" great renunciation " is as real as that of 
Gotama Buddha ; greater indeed, for sweeter 
and higher and more full of joy — the great 
renunciation of Jesus was as full of depend- 
ence on God as one can conceive : and yet 
it was the statement that all union with the 
Ultimate Divine was meant to be a prepara- 
tion for carrying out the divine ideal which 
that union had procured. Brought into the 
circle of the Divine Presence, " thinking 
God's thoughts after Him," there grows up 
in the soul a divine ideal. I must realise 
it, and make it plain in the terms of com- 
mon life ; and so you get to the third element, 
Man for God. 

The soul is dependent, as I have implied, 
for inspiration, not for rescue. For religion 
is not a process of insurance. The Being who 
could devise in the human soul a plan by 
which it was to be insured against Himself 
would require to take out a policy that would 
cover the Infinite ; for nothing under that 
aspect would require so complete an insurance 
as God. That would be the terrible thing 
about it, that the smallest of all God's senti- 
ent and rational creatures being at risk from 
the Being that made him would be an im- 
putation directly upon the Being Who made 



244 



One World at a Time 



him as being non-moral, or immoral. That is 
our protest. We are not dependent upon 
God simply for rescue, but for inspiration. 
We look to Him for revelation ; we want to 
have Him made plain. " No man hath seen 
God at any time. The only-begotten Son 
which is in the bosom of the Father hath 
declared Him." You can imagine all men 
near-sighted, never having seen a star, and 
then the world coming in procession to the 
telescope and revealing the new heavens, — 
the sidereal heavens made plain to a near- 
sighted world. This is just what happened in 
Jesus Christ. Men had not any view of God 
that would satisfy until they learned it, appre- 
hended it, had it made plain in terms of a 
human life. That was the lens through 
which God showed Himself to the eye that 
searched for Him. 

In " Man for God," I think we get a very 
simple definition of religion, — that it is a pas- 
sionate devotion to the will of God. Here 
I outline what I mean by the teaching of re- 
ligion. Take this definition, which seems 
to me enough, that religion is a passionate de- 
votion to the will of God. To teach religion 
is not to teach its definitions. When a clergy- 
man a little while ago said to me, " I cannot 



How Can Religion Be Taught ? 245 



conceive how religion can be taught without a 
catechism or a formulated statement," I said to 
him, " Cannot you teach cooking without a 
cook-book ? Cannot you teach carpentry with- 
out a treatise upon mechanics ? Cannot the 
living soul that knows a thing show how it 
knows it without defining the terms in which it 
knows it ? Do I require a chemical analysis 
of my luncheon, in order to know that it is 
palatable ? Serve up your dinner with a 
chemical analysis, and see how much you would 
eat at the end of the week. You would dread 
the chemical analysis more than you would 
want the dinner. The prescription is not the 
medicine ; the theory is not the fact ; the de- 
finition is not religion. We give the definition 
of religion as " a passionate devotion to the will 
of God," — but in this religion does not appear 
as having a definition of what God is, nor how 
the will is related to Him, nor what we mean by 
devotion, — whether saying prayers or praying, 
whether reciting a creed or living it. It does 
not require a definition of the primary passions 
of life to know what a passionate devotion to 
the will of God is. There are four volumes of 
metaphysic enclosed in that sentence : the first 
having to do with the primary passions of 
human nature ; the second with the rites of 



246 One World at a Time 



religion as formed in devotion ; the third with 
the ethic of the soul; and the fourth with a 
theologic statement of the theory of God. 
You might have all that in the terms of every 
seminary in the world that teaches what it 
calls a " body of divinity " ; — that is, it lays 
upon the dissecting-table the dead form of Re- 
ligion, and calls the class round for a clinic, — 
you might have all that, and be just as free 
from all religion as some of the seminaries 
are. One man, at least, should be kept in the 
faculty of every Theological School who has an 
enthusiasm for the pastoral office, and knows 
the souls of men in the active work of the 
ministry. Why ? Because it is absurd for a the- 
ological school to be made up simply of aca- 
demic instruction. That is necessary. You 
must have the study of church history for 
the sake of the history and not for the sake of 
the church. You must have all that goes 
with the whole curriculum of a well-equipped 
theological school. But there must be in all 
such schools human souls that have a pas- 
sionate devotion to the will of God. I do 
not say that definition is not useful. I do 
not say that when you want to draw a line 
around things you have not to define them ; 
but I shall never be convinced, I think, — at 



How Can Religion Be Taught ? 247 



least in my present condition of rationality, — 
that the survey of a field is a substitute for 
the crop you can get out of it. So we must 
have something else than definition in the 
teaching of religion. There must be the 
statement, as I have said, of the phenomena 
of religion ; as, for instance, in thinking of 
the Being of God. Let me use that as an 
illustration. It would seem that " He that 
cometh to God must believe that He is." That 
is fundamental. It is not important at all as 
to the fact of religion, but it is as to the 
character of it, what God seems to him to be 
like. " He that cometh to Him must believe 
that He is " ; or else he is going on a fool's 
errand. He is not going at all ; he is simply 
wandering around. He is simply a lunatic 
outside bounds. " He that cometh to God 
must believe that He is." What I maintain, as 
I have said, is that the fact of religion is not 
dependent upon his determining what God is 
exactly like. 

An elder in a recent session of the Presby- 
terian Assembly rose in his place and made 
this speech : " How do we know that God 
could save the race? We do not know. If 
God had said, ' I propose to save the whole 
human race,' Satan would have risen in his 



248 One World at a Time 



place, there and then, and would have said, 
' That is just what I told Eve, Ye shall not 
surely die.'" Now, I can believe easily, that 
he was a good man, in spite of this foolish 
statement. The statement is foolish, because 
it is a bit of mythology flung into the face of 
the twentieth century. It is based upon the 
first chapter of the Book of Job, where God 
is represented as an Eastern sovereign, a Shah 
of Persia, with provinces, outlying districts, 
and satraps of these provinces bringing in 
their reports. So the first chapter of the 
Book of Job opens, " Now there was a day 
when the sons of God came to present them- 
selves before the Lord, and Satan came also 
among them." Then the book goes on to say 
that they made their various reports, and the 
Being, the Shah of Persia, is represented as 
saying, "There is a man in my province, Job. 
Hast thou considered him ? for there is none 
like him in the earth, a perfect and upright 
man." Then they have a dialogue about Job ; 
and Satan proposes certain tests of Job's 
goodness. He says, " He is a rich man, a 
prosperous man ; but if his goods are taken 
away, he will renounce thee." And his wealth 
was taken away ; but Job blessed God. Then 
Satan said, " Lay thy hand upon his body, and 



How Can Religion Be Taught? 249 

he will renounce thee." So Job was afflicted in 
sore ways; and he still blessed God. In the 
midst of it all he said, " I know that my Aven- 
ger liveth ; and that he shall stand up at the 
last upon the earth ; and after my skin hath 
been thus destroyed, yet from my flesh shall 
I see God, whom I shall see for myself, and 
mine eyes shall behold, and not another." This 
was the mold in which the Presbyterian elders 
thought about God was cast. 

The effort of this good man to say what 
God was like did not invalidate the fact of 
religion in him at all. It only impaired his 
usefulness as a teacher of theology. In 
other words, a man out of the Middle Ages 
cannot have a chair in a theological school 
in the twentieth century with advantage to the 
school. Here was a group concerned with 
the revision of the Westminster Confession, 
and for that reason the thing that was said 
was perfectly apt to the occasion ; for one 
form of mythology was matched with another. 
It is the illustration of what Froude says so 
splendidly : " Reason is no match for super- 
stition ; one great emotion must be expelled 
by another." What God is like is subject for 
debate. What God is, and that God is, is sub- 
ject for the soul's apprehension and adoration. 



250 One World at a Time 

In order to the teaching of religion, then, 
in any real way, there is but one thing to be 
considered, namely, the giving of direction 
to the temper and spirit of the taught. It 
involves a crystalline sincerity. That is the 
first step. A crystalline sincerity, an un- 
clouded eye to see, an ear hospitable to every 
voice that has anything to say that means 
good, — this implies a teachable spirit. Un- 
willingness to be convinced is the beginning 
of perdition to the soul. There must be an 
open-minded hospitality, so that light may 
enter into the mind. 

Two other elements enter into the condi- 
tion of this directed mind ; not only that it 
shall be teachable, willing to know, not only 
that it shall be sincere, with clear vision, 
when the thing to be known is presented ; 
but there must be in it earnestness. Men 
demand easy religion ! Nothing else is easy 
in life. Ask the man of whom you speak as 
having life on his own terms, whether life is 
on his own terms or not. Ask him what anxi- 
eties corrode his mind, what solicitudes per- 
plex him ; what embarrassments impede him. 
He will tell you there is no life that is easy, 
and it ought not to be. As in the natural 
world the struggle is the process of survival, 



How Can Religion Be Taught? 251 



so in the moral world it is struggle of soul 
that saves. 

Finally, there must be an unselfish devotion. 
Without teachableness we have no advance. 
Without crystalline sincerity we have no self- 
knowledge. Without earnestness we have 
no momentum. Without unselfish devotion 
we have no usefulness. Whatever you acquire 
in the name of religion is only taken to your 
mint to be put into the current coin of the 
realm. It must go into circulation thereafter. 
It is the thing men trade in and need for the 
sustenance of life. 

The teaching of religion depends, most of 
all, upon the impact of one nature, upon an- 
other. Over and over again I hear the teach- 
ers in Sunday-school say, " I remember a 
teacher whom I had in my early boyhood or 
girlhood. I cannot remember more than her 
name. I do not remember anything she ever 
taught me ; but somehow or other she made 
me believe that God was real, and that God 
was known to her." That is the impact of 
one spiritual nature on another. That is 
essential in the teaching of religion. The 
most brilliant discourse is as vain as the most 
flippant language, unless the discourse carries 
with it the sense that the man has contact 



252 One World at a Time 

with divine realities. When Bunsen lay dy- 
ing, looking into his wife's face, he said, " In 
thy face have I seen the Eternal." That was 
what John meant in his Gospel about making 
God plain in terms of human flesh. You 
remember, in Robert Elsmere, how the dying 
workman called Robert to his side and told 
him how he had made him, by the very aspect 
of his life, believe in God ; that is to be the re- 
vealer of God in terms of human life. 

Many persons have been thrilled to hear 
Robert Collyer tell how, after he had come 
into the Unitarian ministry, he went back to 
Yorkshire, and preached to the congregation 
in which his aged mother sat, who had never 
heard him preach since the days when he 
was a Methodist. She took his arm going 
home from church, and gave it that little hug 
that mothers will, and said to him, " Ah, Rab- 
bie ! I didna understand much thee said, and 
what I did understand I didna like ; but I 
believe in thee." That is the real thing. " I 
believe in thee ! " That is what Paul meant 
when he said, " Whose I am, and whom I 
serve." That is what he meant when he said, 
" Faithful is he that called you, who also 
will do it." That is what he meant when he 
said, " All things work together for good to 



How Can Religion Be Taught? 253 



them that love God." That is the final con- 
viction in the teaching of religion. It is the 
impact of a believing soul upon the soul 
which seeks to believe. 



CHAPTER XII 



HOW TRADITIONAL RELIGION MAY 
BECOME PERSONAL 

JESUS among his people stood in the 
midst of institutions hoary with age, him- 
self a youth, vital with spiritual consciousness. 
They quoted against his enthusiasm the age- 
long antecedents of their cult, and he chal- 
lenged them to show that they were operative 
in the achievements of the spiritual life. 

The process is historic, as well as individual, 
in which, through all time, the passage has 
to be made from the speculative reason to the 
practical reason before we are sure of any one 
thing. The speculative reason is the field of 
our gymnastic ; the practical reason is the 
arena of our conflict and the opportunity of 
our work. This was what Jesus continually 
contended for. The woman of Samaria, a 
woman without character, said, in absolute 
devotion to the orthodoxy of her religion, 
which had not touched her life in any way : 

254 



Personal Religion 



255 



" Our fathers worshipped in this mountain, 
and ye say that in Jerusalem is the place 
where men ought to worship." That is tradi- 
tional religion asserting itself through the lips 
of an immoral person, and absolutely correct 
in its differentiation between " this mountain " 
and that, between this " worship" and that; 
and the reply of the Master of the art of living, 
the simple man whose chivalry did not even 
abash her, nor send her other than repentant 
away, was : " Neither in this mountain nor yet 
in Jerusalem shall men worship the Father. 
The Father seeketh them to worship Him who 
worship Him in spirit and in truth." It is the 
passage from traditional religion to personal 
experience. It is the problem which Luther 
solved when, toiling on his knees up the 
great stair, — a stair built on the treads and 
uprights of traditional religion — he heard a 
voice in his ear that said : " The just shall 
live by his faith." He arose from the toiling 
on his knees to the activities of his life, turned 
his back upon the monastery and upon the 
cloister, and entered into marriage and work 
and beneficence as a man and not a priest. 

For religion in its last analysis is personal, 
not traditional. It is traditional in that it 
may be carried across from age to age. It is 



256 



One World at a Time 



traditional, for instance, in the Philippine Isl- 
ands, where every question yet of personal 
religion and of national ethics is to be solved. 
The friars own the land, and the people do 
not own themselves. It is traditional in those 
great Catholic belts of Southern America, in 
which every punctilio of service is observed, 
but where civilisation languishes for want of 
humanness. It is observed if you would go 
to an audience with the Pope of Rome. You 
would be inquired of, not whether you be- 
lieved in the personal sanctity of Leo XIII., 
in which we must all in large measure believe 
who know of the devotion and sympathies 
of this beautiful old man ; but you would 
be asked by the master of ceremonies if you 
understood ''the etiquette of the occasion." 
The etiquette of the occasion does not mean 
that you shall accept the vicar of the Most 
High as a person charged with a message 
to you. It means that the women must go 
veiled, and the whole company must kneel 
when the Pope enters his audience chamber, 
and if he is gracious enough to present his 
signet they must kiss it. This is tradition- 
alism. 

So, throughout the whole world, the effort 
of man has been to put himself into actual 



Personal Religion 257 



relations with the universe, and he does so 
when he leaves the pages of the past in which 
that effort is inscribed. He reads there the 
history of religion, the history that followed 
its traditions, that is made up in part of what 
it did and in part of what it dreamed ; but no 
man finds his adjustment to the universe in 
the pages of history. To recite trippingly 
upon the tongue some creed of the past may 
be most useful, as putting you in line with the 
continuity of religious thought. But it is 
quite possible to say the things impossible to 
believe, and a useful exercise goes on in all 
sensitive souls in the recitation of the forms 
of faith, — a translation out of the archaic 
phraseology, reciting the phraseology of the 
past in the terms of present emotion and of 
present faith. So that when a clergyman of a 
New York church was asked, " How, in view 
of the fact that you believe in the essential 
humanity of Jesus of Nazareth, are you able 
to recite the Apostles' Creed ? " he answered : 
" I say to myself, ' who is said to have been 
conceived of the Holy Ghost and born of the 
Virgin Mary.' " That parenthetic process 
goes on all the time. Into that interval of 
the parenthesis dropped the sincerities of his 
life. Into the chasm in his thinking dropped 



258 One World at a Time 



the directness of his mind ; for the passage 
from traditionalism to personal religion must 
be made, no matter where you start. You 
may start at the antipodes, of the Catholic 
Church upon the one side, and at very liberal- 
ism upon the other ; but still, what relation do 
you own to the Infinite ? That is the problem 
set for all of us. It is the source of the soul's 
struggle. It is the major premise in all the 
soul's argument with life. 

I do not for one moment lose sight of the 
thought side of religion ; but the thought side 
of religion cannot be a thought quoted with- 
out ceasing from intellectual eminence. Em- 
erson said, very well, that next to him who 
uttered a great thought was the man who 
quoted it. But to be perpetually in quota- 
tion is to be ever in process of rehearsing 
tradition. The tradition preserves that which 
constitutes the background of our thinking ; 
it is not thinking itself. It was thought ; but 
it is not thought, you perceive. Whatever 
creed is stated, the moment any man says, 
" Credo," " I believe," he is in active, intel- 
lectual, moral, spiritual process ; but the next 
man who says, " I believe," and quotes him, 
does not say the same thing at all. He says : 
" I believe what the other man believed," and 



Personal Religion 259 



he is one remove away from that warm centre 
of conviction which in the first man made the 
statement of his faith. Take, for instance, 
the creed called the " Creed of Nicaea," be- 
gun in 325 in the Council of Nicaea, and 
formulated and completed in 380 in the Coun- 
cil of Constantinople. Examine that state- 
ment. I do not intend to controvert any 
element in it. I believe profoundly that the 
enunciation of it saved the Christian Church, 
as I could prove to you by a most simple 
process. When it was declared that the Son 
was of the "same substance" with the Father, 
the first utterance was made which modern 
thought expresses in the integrity of all life 
and the essence of all life. It was a wonder- 
ful declaration. Not Arius, but Athanasius 
saved the Church. But when the modern 
man, dusty with his business, brushes himself 
off and goes to church, or shifts his business 
suit for his holy cloak, and goes into the place 
of prayer, and begins to recite the Creed of 
Nicaea, he is not at all conscious of the strug- 
gle that went to the making of it, — how, in 
that convention of ecclesiastics, blows were 
struck and oaths were uttered, and anger 
was hot for the integrity of the faith. He 
is trying to put into his Occidental way of 



260 One World at a Time 



thinking, into his Western mind, a philosophic 
statement produced largely under Asiatic con- 
ditions ; for of the 318 bishops and ecclesi- 
astics that constituted the Council of Nicsea, 
only some twelve or fifteen were from the 
West of Europe. It is a philosophy of re- 
ligion that he is reciting, and you can imagine, 
as he stands there and recites the Nicene 
Creed without much thought, able sometimes 
to remember what it really is, and most often 
reading it from the book, — as he stands there, 
you can imagine the surprise of all the mar- 
tyrs that died for the truth, and all the angels 
that attended their flight from earth, to see a 
modern man reciting a philosophic formula, of 
which he has never weighed one syllable per- 
haps in all his days, and calling it an exercise 
of personal religion ! It is quite possible for 
him to make that personal, — quite possible 
for him to apprehend what Athanasius was 
struggling for, and enter into that struggle of 
soul. If he can believe it, and adjust it to his 
life, and make it practical in his common af- 
fairs, he has solved one problem in religion, — 
he has passed from traditionalism to personal 
experience. But you have not in that creed, 
nor in any other, so far as I know, — a state- 
ment of personal religion. I do not know in 



Personal Religion 261 



one of them anything that can be parallelled 
with the Beatitudes, which deal with life and its 
blessedness. The creeds deal with thought and 
its accuracy ; and between the blessedness of 
life, the beatitude of experience, and accuracy 
of statement, there is all the difference be- 
tween the rosy child that is so full of life your 
arms can scarcely hold him while you love 
him, and the placid and statuesque perfection 
of the dead. 

" The soul divines what is divine," said 
Tertullian in one of his better moments. 
" The soul divines what is divine." And our 
modern statement of it is, " That is inspired 
which inspires." 

I am not for one moment to be un- 
derstood as declaring against the traditions 
of religion. I simply say they are not relig- 
ion's self. They are useful, as the museums 
are useful, as the history of the literature of 
the world is useful ; but between the living 
creature, that looks at the preserved specimen 
in the museum, and the fossil itself are all the 
diameters that we mean by life, — so wide that 
they cannot be compared by their measure- 
ment together. The living child, wondering 
before the great restored fossil creature, that 
after being exhumed has been set up in its 



262 



One World at a Time 



skeleton as it was in antediluvian days, — the 
living child standing wondering at it, is greater 
than the thing at which it looks ; because all 
history — is implicit in the child, and this other 
has been left a remainder from the past. The 
skeleton dug up and a history in process are 
things so different that one can scarcely com- 
pare them together. 

One grows weary of the people who have 
the theory of things ; — the great dramatic 
critic who cannot write a line that anybody 
can play on the stage ; the great musical critic 
whom you would dismiss, that you might hear 
an old darky sing with his mellow voice, into 
which generations of tears have gone, and the 
agony of his people ; a minister of religion, 
whom you are glad to detect in any useful 
employment ; you follow him up with detec- 
tive exaction, and, beyond the theories of the 
philosophy of religion which he may have, you 
at last discover him in the practice of the 
things that he preaches ; in all these instances 
we find the passage from traditionalism to what 
is personal and immediate. 

What do we mean by personal religion ? 
Religion is a passion, a devotion to the will 
of God. It does not much matter what the 
god is called, or how his will is conceived, 



Personal Religion 263 



or what degree of passion is maintained, so 
that the soul have passion, devotion to the 
will of God. For it is our relationships that 
matter, not the definition of what those re- 
lationships should be. Better give one's self 
absolutely to worship than to be most emi- 
nently wise about idols, and go from one 
pedestal to another until one's fancy is pleased 
with a god. That is not worship ; that is 
not devotion ; there is no passion in that. 
That is fooling with an aesthetic sense in the 
name of a great process in human life. It is 
for this reason that Calvin and Theodore 
Parker are equally admirable in their attitude 
and relation to that which they believed, 
Theodore Parker said he agreed with Calvin 
perfectly, for Calvin's God was his devil. 
Still, the relation was exact between the being 
whom Calvin worshipped, and whom we abhor 
in his description of him, and the being 
whom Theodore Parker worshipped and whom 
we adore in his description. It is relation 
that is essential ; and the relation, being vital, 
carries worth with it. Take the commonest 
relation of life. Marriage is an instinct based 
in the physical nature of the race. Marriage 
is a passion in which an instinct is kindled 
until it flames. Marriage is an ideal in which 



264 One World at a Time 



all the basilar instincts are subordinated and 
sublimated at once to the service of the soul. 
Marriage is a beatitude, a sacrament. The 
Church of Rome is right in calling it one of the 
seven sacraments. It is a sacrament in which 
stand hand in hand the man and woman, and 
they bow themselves before God unashamed. 
This one word that I have used — relation — 
makes the difference from first to last. 

So religion is a passionate devotion to the 
will of God. That is definition enough, I 
think. In what sense, then, is it personal ? 
I have already intimated to you that every 
tradition clustered around some warm-hearted 
faith. The aberration from that centre of 
summer in the soul was when intellectual ac- 
curacy was substituted for an experience of 
life. That is the great heresy. The world 
has never entertained any heresy which for 
hurtful influence is like that ; and that lies 
at the root of insistence upon traditionalism. 
The comical little catechism, quoted in a New 
York newspaper a while ago as having been 
put out by the Anglican Catholic clergy, 
represented everybody who is not in what 
they call the " ark of safety," with the other 
animals, as in the great wash of the deluge. 
It is a very small vessel for so large a sea, 



Personal Religion 265 



and so many people will be drowned around 
it, that I think the waters will be clogged 
up as in the Sea of Sargasso. The heresy of 
it is that it insists that tradition is authority ; 
that accurate statement is salvation ; that con- 
formity to a form of words has saving power. 
That is the great heresy wherever it is found 
in the history of the world, — that exactness of 
definition is reality. I have many a time 
called your attention in these pages to 
this fundamental distinction which we must 
maintain or be lost in our thinking : that defi- 
nition is never the thing defined. The pre- 
scription is not even the drug, and the drug 
is not the cure ; and yet to be wise in pre- 
scriptions makes an apothecary, who must yet 
take his own drugs to be cured. Definition 
is not mathematics, ranging from the simplest 
primary question of addition and so on clear to 
higher mathematics, where most of us get lost ; 
and yet the wise wren builds her nest and 
broods her young, and the spider knows how 
large the door of his little hole in the ground 
must be to serve as a trap to pull after him 
when he goes in, and " nature loves the num- 
ber five," and does not know why, — all inno- 
cent of mathematics, because the definition is 
not the reality, — the reality is the cause of the 



266 



One World at a Time 



definition. In the wide spaces of Arabia the 
mathematical science was born, and the heavens 
lent their aid to the calculations of him who in 
algebra and its kindred sciences sought to con- 
stitute a science under the light of the stars. 

The definition is never the reality. That is 
the vanity of the people who say : " I am a 
Channing Unitarian," or, " I am a Theodore 
Parker Unitarian." Phillips Brooks had the 
right idea about that. When somebody was 
asked by him why she attended Trinity 
Church, this simpering woman said : "I do 
not know why, but I suppose I am a Brooks- 
ite." And he said : " Good-day, madam." 
That was the only answer. A Channing Uni- 
tarian, if he would read Channing, would 
discover that he was the most vitally and im- 
mediately religious of men. He was dealing 
with things as he found them, and seeking to 
help the age in which he lived. He was dealing 
with questions from Napoleon in his greed of 
conquest to slavery in its enormity of guilt ; he 
dealt with the common vices and virtues of the 
time in which he lived, in a way that showed the 
living soul. That is the way to be a Channing 
Unitarian, — to have your soul alive to every 
blessed and infernal thing in sight, and seek to 
change the nether side of life to its beatitudes. 



Personal Religion 267 



This must be, for the reason that all rela- 
tions are personal. The moment the human 
consciousness arrived at the concept of per- 
sonality, it set up personal relations with the 
universe. If you stand at all — as you must if 
you are aware of modern thought — for the 
natural function of religion, you are dealing 
with a part of your nature just as much as 
when you are learning the laws of light as 
related to the eye, or the laws of sound as re- 
lated to the ear. You are dealing with a 
function of your daily life in religion. Over 
and over again men say to me : "I have at last 
come to the conclusion that I must attend to 
the religious side of my nature." Well, that 
late conclusion does them credit, for the re- 
ligious side of their nature has been knocking 
and knocking, and asking attention. Let it be 
attended to ! It has been whispering ques- 
tions to them that nothing else answered, rais- 
ing conflicts in their minds that nothing else 
could allay, presenting conditions of human life 
as they arise year by year in terms of gladness 
and sorrow so that nothing else could adjust 
them ; and at last they are attending to what has 
been there all the time, — the religious side of 
their nature. I say to you with all the serious- 
ness of which I am capable, that you cannot 



268 One World at a Time 



neglect it without dwarfing your powers, and 
that that relation is a personal relation ; for 
the reason, if I may make this plain by an 
illustration or two, that all the achievements 
of life come, sooner or later, in their highest 
terms, out of a conscious adjustment of the 
person to the nature of which he seeks to in- 
quire. For instance, shut the eye away from 
light long enough, and it is blind, Keep the 
arm, as the Indian ascetic does, lifted toward 
heaven long enough, and it is paralysed. 
Stand with Simon Stylites on his pillar, with 
his rope girdle, long enough still, and decay 
sets in ; and yet the ascetic is doing it in the 
name of a personal relation. What I de- 
sire to bring home to the mind of the reader 
with all possible directness is this : That when 
a human being gets down before God in prayer, 
or stands, as our Oriental friends would in 
prayer — no matter what the attitude, if the soul 
is going out toward its source of life, is seeking 
its springs in the Being that made it — when that 
transpires the relation is as real, as vital, and 
as natural, as when the eye is delighted with 
the first kiss of light, or the ear is delighted 
with the first matin song of birds, or when 
your child crawls into your bed in the morning 
and snuggles down ; that is an act of personal 



Personal Religion 269 



devotion to you out of whose being it came, 
and into whose arms it is folded for safety and 
infantile delight. I believe in God, but that 
is not enough. I must believe God. " I know," 
says the apostle, not " in whom I have be- 
lieved," but " I know whom I have be- 
lieved." That is personal relationship. When 
we speak into the ear of the Most High, we 
are not crying into the void. All definitions 
of philosophy are inapt, incomplete. The 
relationship between the soul and God is a 
relationship that must be personally realised, 
personally believed. No knowledge of tradi- 
tion is a substitute for it, and no delight in 
tradition can take its place. And nothing that 
any human soul can do but the abandon of 
itself unto the Infinite, can be called in any sense 
the passage from traditional religion to religion 
that is personal. For religion is not a theory, 
but an experience. Religion is not a guess, 
but a certainty. There are theories mani- 
fold, but they are not itself. There are 
guesses multiform, but they are not itself. 
The reality is never the thing described. 
The soul is an explorer for reality, and its ex- 
ploration is its experience, and its experience 
is its life. This is religion. 



What is Christianity ? 

BY 

Dr. ADOLF HARNACK 

RECTOR AND ORDINARY PROFESSOR OF CHURCH HISTORY IN 
THE UNIVERSITY, AND FELLOW OF THE ROYAL 
ACADEMY OF SCIENCE, BERLIN 

Translated by T. BAILEY SAUNDERS 

With a Special Preface to the English Edition by 
the Author 

8° (By Mail, $1.90) Net, $1.75 



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communion with God which is of the essence of the gospel, 
and for its stimulating thought we commend it heartily to the 
study and thought of our readers." — Christian World, New 
York. 

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deep and wide influence. It exhibits an originality and in- 
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THE GOSPEL AND ITS EARLIEST 
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A Study of the Teaching of Jesus and its Doctrinal 
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